Question

I’m looking through some logs trying to explain some “interesting” behavior and I’m seeing some users come to my application with a user agent similar to this one:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X; en_US) AppleWebKit (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile [FBAN/FBForIPhone;FBAV/4.1.1;FBBV/4110.0;FBDV/iPad2,1;FBMD/iPad;FBSN/iPhone OS;FBSV/5.1.1;FBSS/1; FBCR/;FBID/tablet;FBLC/en_US;FBSF/1.0]

If I run this string through udger.com I get the following result:

This screen shot and user agent confuses me because it says it’s the mobile safari for iPod and iPad. I see iPad in the first part of the user-agent, but I also see a lot of references to FB and iPhone and iOS and all kinds of other things.

I’m curious if this is a “generic” user-agent that is served up by the Facebook for iOS application, and if it is – is the device an iPad or is it just not clear enough to tell?

Answer 1

Yes it is the iOS Facebook app….

The following is the user agent string from an iPhone 4s showing that it includes the correct device iPhone4,1

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_0_1 like Mac OS X)
AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/10A523
[FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/5.3;FBBV/89182;FBDV/iPhone4,1;FBMD/iPhone;FBSN/iPhoneOS;
FBSV/6.0.1;FBSS/2; FBCR/O2;FBID/phone;FBLC/en_US]

The devices shown seem to follow the same model identification shown in an answer on detecting iOS models

@"i386"      on the simulator
@"iPod1,1"   on iPod Touch
@"iPod2,1"   on iPod Touch Second Generation
@"iPod3,1"   on iPod Touch Third Generation
@"iPod4,1"   on iPod Touch Fourth Generation
@"iPhone1,1" on iPhone
@"iPhone1,2" on iPhone 3G
@"iPhone2,1" on iPhone 3GS
@"iPad1,1"   on iPad
@"iPad2,1"   on iPad 2
@"iPad3,1"   on iPad 3 (aka new iPad)
@"iPhone3,1" on iPhone 4
@"iPhone4,1" on iPhone 4S
@"iPhone5,1" on iPhone 5
@"iPhone5,2" on iPhone 5

This means the string you show that it was an the facebook app on iPad 2