12.0p Device type recognition on iPad and Showcase not loading on Chrome iPad

[Blama]

Hi Isomorphic,

we have a few problems with running our app on an iPad Air 2, iOS 13.1.3.
Some of the problems can be seen in the showcase as well.

Open this sample (v12.0p_2019-11-15) and paste the following code in Safari:

isc.IButton.create({
    title: "Hello",
    icon: "icons/16/world.png",
    iconOrientation: "right",
    click: "isc.say('Tablet: ' + isc.Browser.isTablet + ', Handset: ' + isc.Browser.isHandset + ', Touch: ' + isc.Browser.isTouch + ', Desktop: ' + isc.Browser.isDesktop)"
})

The result on button click is that only true is for "Desktop", which is unexpected. I'd expect true for Touch and Tablet and false for Desktop and Handset.

Please note that while my setting under (menu names are my translation to English, iPad is on German) "Settings" -> "Safari" -> "Always request desktop site" -> "All websites" is enabled (which is most likely the default), I don't think this should affect these four methods.

Also, the showcase does not load in Chrome (2019-11-03, v78.0.3904.84) on this iPad at all, if I don't explicitly request the desktop version (here it is the other way around, default is to request the mobile version).

The Safari problems are more relevant for us.
If it helps, please see the attached different UA outputs from here (random site found for this).

Best regards
Blama

[Blama]

Hi Isomorphic,

can you tell me if this is a bug? I'd need to start with optimizing layout here soon and how to do this depends on if the problem will be addressed.

Best regards
Blama

[Isomorphic]

Hi Blama
Sorry for the silence on this. We have a developer taking a look and will follow up shortly

Regards
Isomorphic Software

[Isomorphic]

Hi Blama
As of iOS 13.x, Safari defaults to having the "request desktop version of site" option enabled for all sites.
As your screenshot above indicates, in this mode the information available in JS about the browser config (navigator.userAgent, navigator.platform, etc) completely omit information indicating that this request is coming from a Tablet device (specifically an iPad).

Making this the default browser behavior is an interesting design choice by Apple. It means that essentially almost all sites designed with a tablet /mobile interface and a desktop interface will no longer display the tablet interface by default for Safari on iPad.

We suspect this may cause some annoyance as it'll look like iOS Safari just "breaks" by serving up the desktop interface unless users are savvy enough to navigate through settings and turn this flag off. We suspect it's possible that this decision may be reversed in the future (but we'll see what happens)

Regardless, for now we've chosen to respond to this by using essentially a hack to detect Safari running in this mode and treat it as any other iPad running Safari (setting isTouch / isTablet etc to true), so the mobile/tablet interface of your SmartClient-based application will continue to be displayed as it was for iOS 12.x

We have included an undocumented flag (window.isc_ignoreMobileSafariDesktopMode) to turn this hack off. Set this to false prior to loading SmartClient to treat this browser as a desktop browser.
This change will be present in the next nightly build (Nov 28 or above)

We will update the documentation around this area once it's clear whether Apple intends to keep this behavior


We'll respond separately on the Chrome issue

Regards
Isomorphic Software

[Blama]

Hi Isomorphic,

it's working using v12.0p_2019-11-29, thank you.

Hi Blama
As of iOS 13.x, Safari defaults to having the "request desktop version of site" option enabled for all sites.
As your screenshot above indicates, in this mode the information available in JS about the browser config (navigator.userAgent, navigator.platform, etc) completely omit information indicating that this request is coming from a Tablet device (specifically an iPad).

Making this the default browser behavior is an interesting design choice by Apple. It means that essentially almost all sites designed with a tablet /mobile interface and a desktop interface will no longer display the tablet interface by default for Safari on iPad.

I did not know that this was different before, but I agree that it is a pretty invasive change in iOS to change this default.

Regardless, for now we've chosen to respond to this by using essentially a hack to detect Safari running in this mode and treat it as any other iPad running Safari (setting isTouch / isTablet etc to true), so the mobile/tablet interface of your SmartClient-based application will continue to be displayed as it was for iOS 12.x

We have included an undocumented flag (window.isc_ignoreMobileSafariDesktopMode) to turn this hack off. Set this to false prior to loading SmartClient to treat this browser as a desktop browser.

I did not expect that your browser recognition is user agent based - I assumed some feature detection based way.
If it is user agent based, is it also future proof, meaning: will it also work with the next iOS version?

We will update the documentation around this area once it's clear whether Apple intends to keep this behavior

Do you mean the mobileDevelopment docs and here especially the "Device type and overriding"-section?

Best regards
Blama

[Isomorphic]

This is the first time that user-agent-based detection has failed, and it's because a vendor intentionally broke it.

Feature detection can fail too. The current best approach for figuring out if something is an IPad would probably break if Apple introduced touch-screen laptops.

Yes, that's the part of the docs that would be updated, if needed.

[Isomorphic]

We've now fixed the issue causing the showcase failing to load (on our public website) on iPad / Chrome.
The change has not yet been deployed to our public site but will be deployed soon

[janusz]

Hi,

Tested on current showcase.

I have similar problems on tablet Samsung Galaxy Tab S6 running Chrome 80.

When opening showcase using desktop mode in Chrome, tablet is detected as desktop without touch capabilities (so touch scrolling is not working). UserAgent: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.117 Safari/537.36". Serving desktop version to tablet is not that bad, however no touch completely breaks usability.

When opening showcase using regular (non-desktop) mode in Chrome, tablet is correctly detected as Mobile and Tablet. UserAgent is then: "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/80.0.3987.117 Safari/537.36"


Best regards,
Janusz

[Isomorphic]

We've made a change to address this issue.
As of the next nightly build (Dated March 28), Smartclient applications should be fully functional on Android / Chrome with the "request desktop site" flag enabled.
The isc.Browser.isTablet flag will be set to false meaning the desktop version of the UI will be served (as requested) but it will now be fully functional and some UI variants that are specific to touch interactions, such as hiding the scrollbars and using touch-drag to scroll components, will be turned on.

This change is present in all 12.x builds

Regards
Isomorphic Software