Detect android webview

Megi Ben Nun picture Megi Ben Nun · Aug 6, 2015 · Viewed 16k times · Source

I have an html-javascript page, and I need to detect whenever it open on web view (Like inside facebook webview, twitter webview, etc.), and if it a webview - display another content.

Note: I do not control the third-party Android apps, so I cannot make changes to their code.

I already found a way to detect an IOS webview (Found it on stackoverflow):

var isIosWebview =/(iPhone|iPod|iPad).*AppleWebKit(?!.*Safari)/i.test(navigator.userAgent)

Now I'm looking for a javascript code that can detect Android web view.

Help?

Answer

Mikhail Naganov picture Mikhail Naganov · Aug 7, 2015

You can't detect it by only using the user agent string, as any app that uses WebView can set the UA string to anything it wants.

If you still insist on using the UA string, this is the explanation of the official docs: initially, Chromium-based WebView was using .0.0.0 as Chrome version suffix; in the newer versions ; wv was added into the platform part of the UA string. Note that pre-KitKat WebViews didn't have the Chrome part. See older posts about that: Android, webview user agent vs browser user agent

Another hint of WebView involvement is presence of X-Requested-With HTTP header with an application package name. Note that this header is also set by XMLHttpRequest, so you need to look for the actual value of the header.

The statement that WebView doesn't support iframes is not correct.