Lets say i have a incoming website request with a url of desktop version
of website.
I'd like to detect if this website has a mobile version.
According to this answer Fetch website mobile version? most of what i have to do is to set User Agent to some mobile phone and server will serve the mobile version.
I think i could also check m.domain.com and mobile.domain.com.
But here's question:
How would i know if server responded with mobile version?
Are there other ways of getting mobile version?
I don't believe there is a one size fits all answer to your question. You could use curl to hit the domain with a couple different user agents and see if different content is returned for mobile vs desktop, or see if you are redirected for either.
Related
I have a situation at hand. Got a domain covid19zim.online and recently developed a dedicated mobile web version to be served on m.covid19zim.online.
So my question is how to I get user agent and direct the user based on the device they are visiting the platform from.
Desktop users will be served with covid19zim.online and mobile users m.covid19zim.online
I found the following package https://github.com/hisorange/browser-detect but its use case is not clearly articulated for my scenario. Thanks.
When user enter my site they receive a dialogue box proposing to install my wonderful app. When the user presses the accept button, the play market page with my app pops up.
This dialog box appears only if user browses from phone.
However, this dialog will popup even if user has my app already. Thus, I am interested in a way to inform site about presence/absence of an app on the phone. If app already installed on a phone, dialog should not appear.
phone w/o app -> browse site -> get dialoge box
phone with app -> browse site -> normal browsing
Simple and useless solution which comes in mind:
If link is opened from my app, it is extended with some action to identify that app is installed.
It is useless, because app is all-sufficient, so opening site will not give any benefit.
A bit more advanced idea was proposed by msh: Give user an option which app will open a link. If link is opened with my app as above.
Is there a better way to do this ?
Yes, Mobile Browsers (on their own) cannot communicate the application installed status to web. But still if you are desperate to implement this behavior, I have got a "WILD" solution for you.
This Solution is divided in two parts: Client Side (Android Device) / Server Side (Web)
Client Side (on Android Device):
In your application you'll need to implement a BroadcastReciever that will be continuously listening to the Network State changes. Whenever a broadcast is received for new network connection available (e.g. when the user turns on the Mobile Data), your app should read the acquired IP address and communicate it to your web-server (using HttpURLConnection).
Communicating the IP address will inform your web-server that the device browsing your website from this IP address has got your application installed.
Server Side (on Web Server):
Your web-server will keep a track of all the IP addresses reported by all the devices on which your application is installed(off-course in a database). To avoid redundant entries you can decide a expiry/validation time for each IP address record received.
Now when your server receives a web request, it will match the IP of the requesting client with all the IP's that were saved in its database. If it finds a matching IP, it means that the web request has come from a device on which your application is already installed. Otherwise you can direct the user to your app's play store link.
Limitation of proposed Solution: This solution will work with 100% accuracy only in the case when the user is using Mobile Data (2g / 3g / etc) to connect to internet. Since using Mobile Data, everytime the device will be issued a unique IP address by the service provider.
This wont work perfectly for wi-fi connections. While browsing using a wi-fi, all the devices that are connected to same wi-fi spot are allocated the same IP address. So there may be a situation where two mobile phones are using internet from same wi-fi spot, out of which one phone has your application installed and the other phone does not. This will confuse the server.
** This solution may not be highly recommended, but could be used with some minor fixes if you don't get any other solutions ;)
It is not possible of course, browser doesn't leak phone configuration and installed apps to random websites (I hope, or somebody has to fix it ASAP)
You can probably make your app react to the VIEW Intent with certain URL then redirect to that URL on your site, but that will make Android ask the user whether they want to open this URL with your app or the browser, so it is not transparent
You could have two seperate urls like: www.yousite.com and www.app.yoursite.com. This way at least the users are free of the popup from the app.
I should identify whether the site is accessed by mobile or web. I am using $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] to identify this. Based on that am loading mobile site.
Everything works fine.
My Problem is, If I change the browser settings in blackberry, from blackberry to Firefox or IE, then it is loading the normal site instead of mobile site.
How to overcome this problem? Please help.
NOTE : Am checking in Blackberry 5
You cannot. You are completely dependent on the browser to tell you what it is. User-agent spoofing blasts that "trust" out of the water.
Instead, you can do "functional" tests in Javascript/CSS that provide features for supporting browsers and fallback mechanisms for non-supporting browsers.
But if you want to switch to a mobile site then you really do just have to do as the browser asks. That's the server's job, anyway; if the user has gone out of their way to pretend that their phone is a normal PC, then that's their choice and your server should just do as it's told.
This is why the option exists in the Blackberry browser in the first place.
As an example, I sometimes find myself making my Android browser spoof itself as Firefox on Windows, so that I can use the normal Facebook site and access features that Facebook haven't implemented on their mobile version.
I have a PHP page (which is displayed through a mobile/android browser) - however, when accessing a link to an external site - it automatically redirects to the mobile version.
I want the link to take user to the desktop version of the webpage even when accessed through a mobile browser.
Is there a way i can specify useragent/or any other setting in my PHP page code to acheive this? Thanks.
Spoofing the user agent string will be a challenge, as it requires you to control the behavior of the browser. You might be able to do it with JavaScript or something, but I doubt it.
If it's just one site, you may wish to take a look at how they're handling redirection of mobile devices. Often, sites will provide mechanisms for overriding the redirect script.
For example, sites using the UC Mobile Web Framework (http://mwf.ucla.edu/) allows you to override their redirect script with a query string parameter. The UCSF Library (http://library.ucsf.edu/) is using that framework for mobile redirects. If you are on a mobile device and go to http://library.ucsf.edu/ then you will be redirected to the mobile version of the site. However, if you go to http://library.ucsf.edu/?ovrrdr=1 then you will get the desktop version.
What you are describing, no. You do not have control of an external site therefore you cannot control what is being served.
I want to develop the mobile (also includes iphone,ipad,andriod) version of my original site. But I don't want to create another sub domain like www.m.mydomain.com, can i dynamically change the document root separately for mobile version and the existing one?
I have also noticed that, when I open facebook form iphone or any andriod mobile it opens with it's original domain name like http://www.facebook.com/ bt when i open it from any other mobile like nokia or samsung it comes with http://m.facebook.com/, what is the difference between this 2?
When it comes to iPhone and Android deveices, a website needs very little adjustments because their web browsering capabilities are really good.
For other devices where the web browsing user experience is less satisfying, the site would dynamically switch them to an alternate and less "intense" version of the website.
As for the m.domain.com feature, this is just a subdomain of the domain.com website. Obviously, it represents a mobile version of the main site and will strip out things like flash and javascript basically anything which will be too much for a basic mobile browser.
The dynamic switching of browsers is done via code. There are ways of detecting what browser just requested your website. Based on the information returned you can then redirect to specific scripts which will handle the user requests from then on.
As an example, you can use this standard argument to check the browsers visiting your site:
$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']
Hope that helped.
You can differentiate it by User-Agent property either on Apache level, or PHP level. Though that will not be guaranteed because UA can be spoofed. (But how many mobile users would do UA spoofing to pretend they're not mobile?)
you could possibly use some solution:
create a specific mobile website and put it on folder/subdomain and redirect any user with mobile to that site, example: mydomain.com/m/ or m.mydomain.com
example on redirection:
http://detectmobilebrowsers.mobi/
http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/lightweight-device-detection-php
or
you could use responsive webdesign technique, some framework already available for this
http://csswizardry.com/inuitcss/
http://www.columnal.com/
http://stuffandnonsense.co.uk/projects/320andup/
The difference is that high end mobile devices like iphone/android have enough support and functionality to support the original version of the website (zooming/javascript etc). Other devices are better served an basic website developed for mobile devices with a limited display and/or support.
You do want an special URL for your mobile website - as you'd like your mobile website to correctly appear in the mobile search of search engines.
www is actually also a subdomain, but it is so often used, people do not usually realize it, Usually most browsers add it by default and this is why most servers have it enabled by default.
The case you pointed out is also of subdomains. The server check your HTTP request's user-agent and redirects you to the mobile subdomain appropriately.
This isn't really a quick solution for you, but I highly recommend reading Ethan Marcotte's Responsive Web Design articles on alistapart.org. He goes over the philosophy as well as the practical steps to make a site work well for different contexts - desktop browser to mobile device, etc. There are several articles on the site (just search for responsive web design you'll get several of his articles in your results.)