What does "Safari (in-app) in Google Analytics refer to?"

Question

Can someone please explain what "Safari (in-app)" means in Google Analytics under Audience | Technology | Browser & OS?

For the Google Analytics for our website, we suddenly started to see significant traffic from this source.

It sounds like it just means that visitors are coming to us through browsers embedded within apps (e.g. like a web viewing control) except that there doesn't seem to be reason why we should be getting such traffic and so suddenly.

We went from zero traffic from this source to almost 40% of our traffic in only two days for no apparent reason! We haven't done anything that can explain this sudden new source of traffic (e.g. we haven't released any apps ourselves) that point back at our website. We're hoping that, if we can find out what "in-app" actually means, we'll be able to understand this traffic.

Thank you

Answer 1

I did some tests on a separate page available only for me using IOS 8.2 and updated 1Password and Facebook App:

1. General Safari browser is reported as Safari 8.0:

   Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12D508 Safari/600.1.4

2. 1Password is reported as Safari 6.0:

   Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/10B329 Safari/8536.25

3. Facebook App is reported as Safari (in-app)

   Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/12D508 [FBAN/FBIOS;FBAV/27.0.0.10.12;FBBV/8291884;FBDV/iPhone7,2;FBMD/iPhone;FBSN/iPhone OS;FBSV/8.2;FBSS/2; FBCR/Play;FBID/phone;FBLC/en_US;FBOP/5]

Tested on 2015.03.31 (yyyy.mm.dd)