Detect if user is using webview for android/iOS or a regular browser

Question

How to detect if the user is browsing the page using webview for android or iOS?

There are various soluti

Answer 1

I came to decision, that instead of detection, more efficient solution simply specify platform in AppConfig.

const appConfig = {
   appID: 'com.example.AppName.Web'
   //or
   //appID: 'com.example.AppName.MobileIOS'
   //or
   //appID: 'com.example.AppName.MobileAndroid'
}

Answer 2

Note: This solution is PHP-based. HTTP headers can be faked so this is not the nicest solution but you can have a start with this.

//For iOS

if ((strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Mobile/') !== false) && (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Safari/') == false) {
    echo 'WebView';
} else{
    echo 'Not WebView';
}

//For Android

if ($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] == "com.company.app") {
    echo 'WebView';
} else{
    echo 'Not WebView';
}

Answer 3

If you're using Flask (and not PHP), you can check to see if "wv" is in the string for the "User-Agent" header. Feel free to edit / add a more precise way of checking it, but basically "wv" is put there if it's a web view; otherwise, it is not there.

user_agent_header = request.headers.get('User-Agent', None)
is_web_view = "wv" in str(header_request) if user_agent_header is not None else False

Chrome Developer Docs:

WebView UA in Lollipop and Above

In the newer versions of WebView, you can differentiate the WebView by looking for the wv field as highlighted below.

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 5.1.1; Nexus 5 Build/LMY48B; wv) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Chrome/43.0.2357.65 Mobile Safari/537.36

Answer 4

Detecting browser for iOS devices is different from the Android one. For iOS devices you can do it by checking user agent using JavaScript:

var userAgent = window.navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase(),
    safari = /safari/.test( userAgent ),
    ios = /iphone|ipod|ipad/.test( userAgent );

if( ios ) {
    if ( safari ) {
        //browser
    } else if ( !safari ) {
        //webview
    };
} else {
    //not iOS
};

For Android devices, you need to do it through server side coding to check for a request header.

PHP:

if ($_SERVER['HTTP_X_REQUESTED_WITH'] == "your.app.id") {
    //webview
} else {
    //browser
}

JSP:

if ("your.app.id".equals(req.getHeader("X-Requested-With")) ){
    //webview
} else {
    //browser
}

Ref:detect ipad/iphone webview via javascript