CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidiosmobileuser-agent
andrewgj
andrewgj

Reputation: 231

Details on user agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0

I work on a platform that sends text messages from businesses to users through SMS (e.g. e-commerce company sends text message to user announcing a new sale, message contains a shortened link to e-commerce company's website).

When a user clicks on a link from a text message we record the user agent of the user's device. We're also able to detect whether a click is a duplicate since we send a unique link per user. In looking at the duplicate click counts by user agent, the following user agent appears at the top of every sent message (it is the biggest offender by several orders of magnitude):

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux i686; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/24.0

This is confusing because this user agent appears to be non-mobile. Does anyone know more about this particular user agent and whether it is represented on mobile in some way that I am missing?

Upvotes: 9

Views: 10979

Answers (3)

Dendril
Dendril

Reputation: 26

That userAgent matches the one used by the Messages-app for Samsung S8 Plus; the one that fetches link previews.

I'm assuming they're using the same crawler for several versions of the app, but I can't confirm this myself since I've only tested for that device.

Upvotes: 0

Ross Spearritt
Ross Spearritt

Reputation: 41

We are seeing the same thing here. I am pretty sure it's related to the new 'lookahead' feature of (at least) Samsung Mobile phones running the latest OS where the actual SMS App in the mobile will 'examine' the URL included so it can show a picture in the SMS Text.

It's pretty easy to test yourself if you have a Samsung S8 or S9. Just send a SMS using the default settings to this mobile and (Without the user touching anything), look for a URL call from the mobile in your logs.

The users can disable this feature, but it's hidden away and not many do, hence the large number of calls. At least you now know the SMS is actually turning up in the users SMS input stream.

Upvotes: 4

user9206396
user9206396

Reputation:

Interesting, I have been looking into this past couple of weeks; we run own affiliate tracking platform and noticed clients with traffic (likely) originating from SMS mesages getting ~50% of the visits with this one offending user agent. The pattern we see is like you describe, except it does not seem to happen always, but when it does, we see the same click repeat typically up to 10 times from the same IP. Since we do not know generally know how/if the the source tracks by the phone number (you say you are able to), we cannot say how this is related to each SMS recipient. But it is very likely this preceeds the human click i.e. we see repeat visits with the offending user-agent and bit later (in case the visitor engages in a click) another click with mobile user agent, all coming from the same IP. I have not yet analyzed the full stack of data I have, but I would guess this is related either to the 3rd party shortener, or to a certain mobile app (security app or feature?), or possibly to the SMS distribution platform; it seem to affect all the operators and geos. I think it would be usefull to know what SMS platform/solution you are using and what shortener.

Upvotes: 0

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