Question

How can I load desktop versions of web sites(such as google, facebook) rather than mobile versions?

Answer 1

Edit: Disregard all this. Yaniv’s right. Just load an NSMutableURLRequest to the UIWebView instance using the - loadRequest: message and set the "User-Agent" header to whatever you want.

NSMutableURLRequest *rq = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:someUrl];
[rq setValue:@"Some desktop user-agent" forHTTPHeaderField:@"User-Agent"];
[webView loadRequest:rq];

For your information, a good choice for a desktop user-agent string is that of Chrome – it’s also WebKit-based, as Safari, so WebKit-specific extensions will work. So try setting the user-agent string to

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.6 Safari/537.11

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Original post:

You can try spoofing the user agent of UIWebView but I can’t guarantee that such a fat hack will let you through the thin gate of AppStore…

void *object_getIvarPtr(id obj, const char *name)
{
    Ivar iv = object_getInstanceVariable(obj, name, NULL);
    off_t offset = ivar_getOffset(iv);
    return (char *)obj + offset;
}

// In some initialization routine, after having created the web view
id webViewInternal = *(id *)object_getIvarPtr(someWebView, "_internal");
id webBrowserView = *(id *)object_getIvarPtr(webViewInternal, "browserView");
id webKitWebView = [webBrowserView webView];

NSString *desktopUAStr = @"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.6 Safari/537.11"
[webKitWebView setCustomUserAgent:desktopUAStr];