Pick up the Android version in the browser by Javascript

Question

I'm building a web app and wanting to disable transitions effects on Android devices under version 3.0.

Is there anyway to pick up the Android version number by Javascript in the browser? If so how?

Answer 1

Use below code to get 2 digit version of Android

var ua = navigator.userAgent;
if( ua.indexOf("Android") >= 0 )
{
  var androidversion = parseFloat(ua.slice(ua.indexOf("Android")+8)); 
  if (androidversion < 2.3)
  {
      // do whatever
  }
}

For example

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; fr-ch; A43 Build/FROYO) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

will return Android Version = 2.2

Answer 2

function getAndroidVersion(ua) {
    ua = (ua || navigator.userAgent).toLowerCase(); 
    var match = ua.match(/android\s([0-9\.]*)/i);
    return match ? match[1] : undefined;
};

getAndroidVersion(); //"4.2.1"
parseInt(getAndroidVersion(), 10); //4
parseFloat(getAndroidVersion()); //4.2

Answer 3

I can't comment because I don't have enough rep... Just wanted to add that I had to change neiker's code to

var match = ua.match(/Android\s([0-9\.]*)/i);

to make it case insensitive because the Galaxy S3 was returning "android" instead of Android in its user agent

Answer 4

You can look at the user agent string - window.navigator.userAgent described here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.navigator.userAgent

If what you're really trying to detect is whether you have a version of the browser that supports a particular feature, then it's nearly always better to use feature detection instead of browser version detection. modernizr is a huge base of code for feature detection that you can either use as is or borrow one particular piece from or just learn how the general technique works.

When I Google, I see user agent strings like this for Android:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 2.2.1; fr-ch; A43 Build/FROYO) AppleWebKit/533.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile Safari/533.1

A regex of /Android\s+([\d\.]+)/ on window.navigator.userAgent will pick up the Android version number.