Mobile browser detection?

Question

We are looking for a way to determine if a user is using a mobile browser. We need to do that in PHP, by parsing the user agent string. I know this method has got many caveats, but we really need to do it that way.

Do you have any suggestion? A good (even if not perfect) updated code?

I know about WURFL, and I believe it's great, but it's not free to use anymore for non open source projects. By googling a bit, I also found this code: http://mobiforge.com/developing/story/lightweight-device-detection-php (and some variations), but I'm not sure about it. Looks like it's written really bad (look, for example, when they use $mobile_browser = '0' with the quotes around an integer...).

Can you recommend something?

Thank you,

Alessandro

Answer 1

I am using this one:

$isMobile = (bool)preg_match('#\b(ip(hone|od)|android\b.+\bmobile|opera m(ob|in)i|windows (phone|ce)|blackberry'.
                    '|s(ymbian|eries60|amsung)|p(alm|rofile/midp|laystation portable)|nokia|fennec|htc[\-_]'.
                    '|up\.browser|[1-4][0-9]{2}x[1-4][0-9]{2})\b#i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] );

It's short and does detect most mobile users (or rather smartphones). iPad and Android-Tablets won't be classified as 'mobile' since they have bigger screen sizes.

If you want to catch Tablets as well, you can use this:

$isMobile = (bool)preg_match('#\b(ip(hone|od|ad)|android|opera m(ob|in)i|windows (phone|ce)|blackberry|tablet'.
                    '|s(ymbian|eries60|amsung)|p(laybook|alm|rofile/midp|laystation portable)|nokia|fennec|htc[\-_]'.
                    '|mobile|up\.browser|[1-4][0-9]{2}x[1-4][0-9]{2})\b#i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'] );

Answer 2

I'm using Mobile_Detect class. It's updated almost weekly. The code looks for signs of 'mobile' device in both HTTP headers and User-Agent string.

Demo ← run this from your mobile device

You will probably be using only:

include("Mobile_Detect.php");
$detect = new Mobile_Detect();
if ($detect->isMobile()) {
    // any mobile platform
}

The class also attempts to detect tablet devices through:

if($detect->isTablet()){
    // any tablet
}

There is no silver bullet in detecting mobile devices, but this is a good start before deciding on using external APIs like WURLF, DeviceAtlas or others.