Question

I’m searching for a way to detect the device my app is running on. I am not interested in software version. I searched many questions but none of them (surprisingly) satisfy my needs for following reasons:

Solution 1:

NSString *deviceType = [UIDevice currentDevice].model;

This does not work because it gives me just “iPad”. I want to know whether it is iPad, iPad 2, new iPad, iPhone 3GS, iPhone4 etc.

Solution 2: Not testing for device type, checking for individual capabilities

This does not apply because I want this data to collect user statistics, not to perform any device specific operation.

Solution 3: Using UIDeviceHardware found here

This code looks pretty outdated and seems to access private data on the device. There is even debate whether an app using this will get approved or not. More importantly, I have no idea how it works 🙂 An alternative is also found here

Are any of the last two I mentioned safe to use? Are they future compliant? Do they comply with Apple approval rules?

Or is there any other method to get around this?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Apple uses such an API in it’s sample code. To Quote the LargeImageDownsizing example project, in the file LargeImageDownsizingViewController.m beginning with line 83:

Choosing appropriate resulting image size and tile size can be done,
but is left as an exercise to the developer. Note that the device
type/version string (e.g. “iPhone2,1” can be determined at runtime
through use of the sysctlbyname function:

size_t size;
sysctlbyname("hw.machine", NULL, &size, NULL, 0);
char *machine = malloc(size);
sysctlbyname("hw.machine", machine, &size, NULL, 0);
NSString* _platform = [NSString stringWithCString:machine encoding:NSASCIIStringEncoding];
free(machine);

_platform in my case would be iPod4,1 for an iPod touch 4th gen.

This code is what is at the root of both of the Github examples you posted.