Retrieve IMEI number/ sim number/mobile number via mobile browser

Question

Following is the scenario: I have an web application accessible via mobile browser. I need to detect a mobile device IMEI and sim IMSI whenever an user clicks on link in my app page accessible via web browser. This is to track the same device with same SIM and provide him/her next level of access. User cannot be tracked using loginid as there is no user login kind of option in my page.

The question is how to get unique device id/sim id via mobile browser for a specific mobile device. For now I am focusing on android based mobile devices. But the target is to make it generic to devices.

Focus of most of the ideas is, what is the kind of access a browser has over the phone and its app?

1. From a browser link we can open a local app in the following way:

   <a href="productcateory://<productid>/<customerid>">Get Details</a> 
   

here productcateory will uniquely identify a local app and invoke it. But its one way communication. How to get back some response from the point of invocation and populate some hidden form field dynamically.

1. Via webpage scripts we can store some data locally at client machine and retrieve it later. but the scope is limited and it is no way connected to IMEI or IMSI number.

2. Is there a way to get a hook to mobile browser app(remember it's like any other mobile application) from the webpage and get the id details via scripts in my page?

3. Is there any option that html5 provides in this regard? I know there is a localstorage tag in HTML5 and one can store an id in the client location and retrieve it later. But this is limited to the same device and same mobile browser and also this is a different solution to get the imei/imsi number

Let me know if there is any other option without asking user to installing a local app or browser plugin on the device?

~inkriti

Answer 1

For very good reasons it is impossible for the web browser to access the IMEI or IMSI numbers of a mobile phone, without some dastardly hacking that the dev teams hadn't expected.

Also the android browser doesn't support plugins.

Your only option is to create a native app. This answer has some info that will be useful to you: Programmatically obtain the phone number of the Android phone. Its not a perfect solution however.

I would also ask why you want access to the users phone number? If its just to track session just use javascript to generate a unique id and store it in a cookie.