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I work on a platform that sends text messages from businesses to users through SMS (e.g. e-commerce company sends text message to user announcing a new sale, message contains a shortened link to e-commerce company's website).
When a user clicks on a link from a text message we record the user agent of the user's device. We're also able to detect whether a click is a duplicate since we send a unique link per user. In looking at the duplicate click counts by user agent, the following user agent appears at the top of every sent message (it is the biggest offender by several orders of magnitude):
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0
This is confusing because this user agent appears to be non-mobile. Does anyone know more about this particular user agent and whether it is represented on mobile in some way that I am missing?
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For example, the current user-agent for Mozilla Firefox version 97 is: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:97.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/97.0. Note, if you have the Firefox 'privacy.
Type about:config in the address bar and press Enter. A warning page may appear. Click Accept the Risk and Continue to go to the about:config page. Search for useragent by typing it into the Search preference name field.
Mozilla/5.0 is the general token that says the browser is Mozilla compatible, and is common to almost every browser today. platform describes the native platform the browser is running on (e.g. Windows, Mac, Linux or Android), and whether or not it's a mobile phone.
A user agent is any software that retrieves and presents Web content for end users or is implemented using Web technologies. User agents include Web browsers, media players, and plug-ins that help in retrieving, rendering and interacting with Web content.
We are seeing the same thing here. I am pretty sure it's related to the new 'lookahead' feature of (at least) Samsung Mobile phones running the latest OS where the actual SMS App in the mobile will 'examine' the URL included so it can show a picture in the SMS Text.
It's pretty easy to test yourself if you have a Samsung S8 or S9. Just send a SMS using the default settings to this mobile and (Without the user touching anything), look for a URL call from the mobile in your logs.
The users can disable this feature, but it's hidden away and not many do, hence the large number of calls. At least you now know the SMS is actually turning up in the users SMS input stream.
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