(iOS) Will mucking about with my User-agent get my app rejected? - ios

In my app, I use the following type of code to muck with the User-agent:
// Fake Firefox's user agent during web service's registration
NSDictionary *dictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:#"Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Windows; U; Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; en-US; rv:12.0) Gecko/20120403211507 Firefox/12.0", #"UserAgent", nil];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:dictionary];
// Return to standard iOS user agent when web service registration is done
NSDictionary *dictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:#"Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3", #"UserAgent", nil];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:dictionary];
Part of my app allows the user to register for a web service using its "sign up for an account" page, and the only way I could find to prevent its website from automatically launching a page which says "DOWNLOAD OUR APP INSTEAD!" is to muck with the user-agent string thusly. I've tried setting the User-agent in a NSMutableURLRequest but I have NOT gotten this to work at all. (Yes I have tried setting both "User-Agent" and "User_Agent" in the NSMutableURLRequest.)
I have heard that this might get your app rejected from Apple. Can anyone confirm or deny, or offer any comment? Thanks!

There are multiple apps on the App Store that fake the user agent as well.
All workarounds for setting the language of NSLocalizedString set a custom value for an Apple key in the NSUserDefaults as well
So I don't think Apple will reject your app.

We use custom user agents in our apps as a way for our servers to know that our app is calling - and to pass extra data, for example, whether the app has a retina screen. As long as you don't rely on this for security it works well. Nothing has ever been rejected as a result.

Related

Set different User-Agents for multiple UIWebViews

My app has UIWebViews, some loading sites where I need the desktop version of the site, some loading sites where I need the mobile version of the site.
So I set the user-agent to a desktop user-agent or a mobile user-agent to achieve this.
For example if I want a UIWebView to load a site's Desktop version I will simply run this code right before:
NSDictionary *dictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:#"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/55.0.2883.95 Safari/537.36", #"UserAgent", nil];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:dictionary];
The problem is that this of course is setting a NSUserDefaults variable, meaning for any UIWebView in my app that loads after this it will use the desktop user agent. I can just flip flop the NSUserAgent as needed between desktop and mobile and load accordingly but sometimes my app requires TWO UIWebViews to load at the same time, one mobile, one desktop.
Is there any way I can set the user-agent of a UIWebView specific to said UIWebView?
I'm assuming this is going to involve swizzling NSUrlRequest methods or something? I know very little about that stuff
The easy way, if possible, is to just use WKWebView instead of UIWebView. WKWebView exposes the user agent string as a property on the class itself (.customUserAgent, iOS9+). As an added bonus, JavaScript code running in the view will be faster and will use less battery power because the JavaScript can be precompiled into native code.
That said, if you have to stick with UIWebView for some reason, you could create an NSURLProtocol that intercepts all your app's HTTP requests and changes the field depending on the hostname in the URL. There are some examples of an NSURLProtocol on Apple's website. Start with that and tweak as needed.

How to fix a "403 - disallowed_useragent" with the native Google Drive iOS SDK?

I'm following the instructions given at: https://developers.google.com/drive/ios/quickstart?ver=swift.
Yesterday it was working but this morning it seems to always fail. The weird part is that I'm using their native SDK. I don't know why does it believe I'm using a web-view. The exact error is:
This user-agent is not permitted to make an OAuth authorization request to Google as it is classified as an embedded user-agent (also known as a web-view). Per our policy, only browser are permitted to make authorization requests to Google. We offer several libraries and samples for native apps to perform authorization request in the browser.
I cloned: https://github.com/googledrive/ios-quickeditor and got the same error.
try this, it will works for
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/41.0.2228.0 Safari/537.36"
Google restrict the authentication from webviews. it's accepting safari webkit useragent .override useragent with above useragent string it will works.
Here is the unfortunate answer: Yes, you are using the example from Google's iOS Quickstart, the "native SDK" as you call it. That's outdated, however, as it uses exactly the embedded web view that Google doesn't want you to use anymore.
If it did work before, but has stopped doing so all of a sudden (like I experienced myself), it may have to do with you changing something related to the client ID. For client IDs that exist for some time, there seems to be a longer grace period until Google hard-blocks the web view use (there should still be just some warning for now, I understand). A new client ID I created recently for unrelated reasons, seems to have caused just that, getting me stuck in having to replace Google Drive authentication code for a new release at short notice.
As to the options (that the so far only other respondent to your question lists from the Google blog post), after a bit of research GTMAppAuth seems to be the most viable option to me, as I am not interested in complete user sign-in and -out. But I may be wrong there.
GTMAppAuth has sample code for iOS, yet just in Objective-C. I have yet to make it through that. In general, your code logic will change like so: Your current solution does authentication purely within your app. It's asynchronous, but doesn't leave your app. The new solution requires you to initiate authentication within your app while preparing and remembering your callback functionality. The authentication initiation then opens a browser outside, which, once done causes a URL callback in your app delegate. In your app delegate, you then check for your prepared callback and, depending on the result status of the outside call, notify the user about success or failure of the outside authentication.
Add this code to your AppDelegate.m (assuming it is in ObjC):
NSString *userAgent = #"Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 10_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/603.1.23 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/10.0 Mobile/14E5239e Safari/602";
// set default user agent
NSDictionary *dictionary = [[NSDictionary alloc]initWithObjectsAndKeys:userAgent,#"UserAgent", nil];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:(dictionary)];
You can solve this issue by using the 3rd party SDK by CloudRail which works fine for Google Drive and the new authentication restrictions. This tutorial exactly shows you how to use an external browser rather than a web -view.

iOS User-Agent for Requesting a Desktop Site

I'm trying to request a desktop site using NSURLRequest. I found from How does Chrome's "Request Desktop Site" option work? that the solution seems to be to set the User-Agent header field to mimic a desktop User-Agent string. However, simply doing
NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:#"http://www.facebook.com"];
NSMutableURLRequest *req = [NSMutableURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
[req setValue:#"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_7_3) AppleWebKit/534.53.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1.3 Safari/534.53.10" forHTTPHeaderField:#"User-Agent"];
[_webView loadRequest:req];
[self.view addSubview:_webView];
doesn't seem to lead me anywhere. My question is is this a correct User-Agent string I can use? Or is perhaps the request overriding the headers sometime after this?
UPDATE:
I tried visiting http://www.useragentstring.com/ instead of facebook to see the User-Agent string at the time of the request. It seems that it's
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/12H141
instead of the string I set. This leads me to think that the request is overriding the User-Agent sometime during the request.
The UIWebView you're using to send the request is adding its own user agent, overriding yours. To change the user agent for your web view, try this
Change User Agent in UIWebView (iPhone SDK)

How can i redirect only ios uiwebview with htaccess?

I can redirect based on user agent. But because of some weird problems on this work i am doing, i need to only redirect in-app uiwebviews to a sub folder or domain. Mobile Safari should be out of this redirect. Need help...
You can change the user agent of the in-app web views by writing to the standard user defaults with the "UserAgent" key. Here is an example,
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:#{
#"UserAgent": #"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_8_2) AppleWebKit/536.26.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.2 Safari/536.26.17"}];

Enable Cookies in UIWebView

How can I enable cookies in my iPhone Application that uses a UIWebView Window, so that my login system will work?
For sure start with
[NSHTTPCookieStorage sharedHTTPCookieStorage].cookieAcceptPolicy =
NSHTTPCookieAcceptPolicyAlways;
But, as mentioned by #JoelFan, the issue may be your User Agent string causing ASP.NET to attempt and fail at a cookieless login. Instead of a response that includes
Set-Cookie: .ASPXAUTH=really-long-hex-number
it returns a redirection to something like
Location: /(F(long-sorta-base64ish-looking-string))/
The default UIWebView user agent string is something like
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 7_0_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/11A501
but ASP.NET doesn't like this. Safari sends something like this:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 7_0_2 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11A501 Safari/9537.53
Do the following early on, maybe in your AppDelegate.m
// DON'T try to reuse a UIWebView for this.
UIWebView *wv = [[UIWebView alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero];
// This webview has already decided to use the default user agent string.
// let's use javascript to get the existing user agent string
NSString *userAgent = [wv stringByEvaluatingJavaScriptFromString:#"navigator.userAgent"];
// let's tack on some stuff to make ASP.NET happy
userAgent = [userAgent stringByAppendingString:#" Version/7.0 Safari/9537.53"];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:#{#"UserAgent": userAgent}];
// New UIWebViews inited after here will use the user agent string you made.
If the site you are logging into is an ASP.NET site, the problem may be due to the UIWebView sending an unrecognized User Agent. See Change User Agent in UIWebView (iPhone SDK)

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