Differentiate between iPad and Mac platforms

[banjerluke]

Problem Statement

Sentry currently reports all iPad users as being on macOS due to both platforms using the same user-agent string. I propose a one-line feature check is added so that iPad sessions can be recorded/tagged properly.

Solution Brainstorm

Safari on iPad (and embedded web views in Cordova/Capacitor apps) use the same user agent as Safari on Mac, and currently Sentry "takes the userAgent string at its word" and reports these users as Mac users.

There is a well-known method for determining whether a page is being viewed on an iPad that is pretending to be a Mac – you check the value of navigator.maxTouchPoints:

const isActuallyAnIPad = navigator.platform === 'MacIntel' && navigator.maxTouchPoints > 1;

navigator.maxTouchPoints is always 1 on a Mac (since there's no touchscreen) and 10 on an iPad. And yes, navigator.platform is MacIntel even on ARM/M1+ chips.

Here's an example of this bit of iPad-detection seen in the UAParser library.

I have real-world situations where behaviors differ on Safari-Mac and Safari-iPadOS, and it would be very helpful to have these segmented out in Sentry.

Thanks for your consideration!

[AbhiPrasad]

Hey @banjerluke thank you for writing in! I don't think we're going to add to the SDK at the current moment, but I recommend just adding this as a tag to your Sentry events. That way you can sort/filter through errors and performance pageloads accordingly.

Sentry.setTag('is_ipad', navigator.platform === 'MacIntel' && navigator.maxTouchPoints > 1);

I'm going to close this as such, but if we get more requests we can re-open this and re-evaluate accordingly!