To add precise contextual data, we work with a partner, Device Atlas, in particular for device and smartphone detection.
This detection can be based on several elements depending on their availability:
- Hit parameter: "&mfmd",
- User-Agent,
- Client-hint
In all cases, the information is sent to Device Atlas, which returns information enabling us to enrich the contextual properties linked to the devices.
Generally speaking, Apple models cannot be precisely identified from the User Agent sent by Apple, as their UAs are increasingly generic, not allowing us to be more precise in detection.
Indeed, if we analyze a User Agent from an iPad:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/17.0.1 Safari/605.1.15
This User Agent does not actually indicate that it is an iPad, because as mentioned in this article, since iOS version 13, Safari no longer includes elements indicating that Safari runs on iOS.
As a result, the iPad or iPhone User Agent will be indistinguishable from the computer version of macOS if the visit is made using the Safari browser.
The detected device will therefore necessarily be recognized as a "Desktop" in our interface, as the corresponding information is not contained in its User Agent.
As of now, we have no way of detecting iPads or iPhones more precisely.
Note: This behavior only applies to iOS devices. For Android devices, detection remains unchanged.