HttpURLConnection in android doesn't send correct User-Agent header [closed]

Question

I have found an issue. I have a server that uses User Agent header to identify the device that is connecting to it. But when i connect to the server using HttpURLConnection i get no User Agent header, but when i connect with the browser it sends the correct User Agent.

For testing i am using an echo server that replies with the headers it found on the request.

When i connect with browser i get: eg: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 1.5; en-fr; HTC Hero Build/CUPCAKE) AppleWebKit/528.5+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Mobile Safari/525.20.1 Up.Link/6.3.1.20.06.3.1.20.0.

But when i connect by code with UrlConnection i get:

User-Agent: UNAVAILABLE.

Does anyone know we i get different behaviors? How i can i connect in the same way the browser does?

EDIT:

What i really need is not only the User-Agent header, i also need some special headers (x-up-subno actually). This header is added by the APN of the operator, but for some reason when i connect by code that headers are not added to the request.

From browser:

From code:

Thanks,

Answer 1

The HTTP specification states that all clients are supposed to sent User-Agent headers. It however, does not state that they should identify the client in the manner a server wishes to. Android therefore complies with the specification, and there is not a lot you can do about it.

The best you could do is to use the setRequestProperty() method to attempt to get a preferable user-agent value in the request. There are no guarantees that it would work, but it is likely. The method needs to be called in the following manner:

connection.setRequestProperty("User-Agent","MyAppName/1.0");

The stock Android browser uses WebKit. If you want to set WebKit's user-agent string, you'll either have to use a static value, or read the user-agent string from WebKit. I haven't attempted this, but the WebKit user-agent string is available in Android via the getUserAgentString() method of the WebSettings class.