Check device type via user_agent (rails)

Question

I want to know whether my users are browsing a page in my rails application with

• a tablet or
• a mobile device or
• a desktop computer

I digged through many different solutions. Here are my favorites:

1. The ua-parser gem: https://github.com/ua-parser/uap-ruby which seems to be very clean but unfortunately it always plots Other when I use parsed_string.device - I can detect the OS and browser with it very well.
2. Writing it from scratch

Writing from scratch ended up in sth like this:

if request.user_agent.downcase.match(/mobile|android|iphone|blackberry|iemobile|kindle/)
  @os = "mobile"
elsif request.user_agent.downcase.match(/ipad/)
  @os = "tablet"
elsif request.user_agent.downcase.match(/mac OS|windows/)
  @os = "desktop"
end

However, what I miss is a complete documentation of the user agent 'device' definitions.

For example: What patterns do I need to look at if my user is browsing on a tablet/mobile device or desktop? I can't just guess and checking e.g. the ua-parser regex is not helping me either (very complicated): https://github.com/tobie/ua-parser/blob/master/regexes.yaml

Is there any simple solution to solve my problem? How does google analytics do it? I tried to research but could not find it. They're also displaying devices (desktop/tablet/mobile).

Answer 1

The browser gem has a suggestion to do this, but until that is added you could still use the gem to figure it out by using browser.device?