Support for GSA (Google Search App)

[haydenth]

Great package. Thanks for doing this, I use it every day. One thing I am noticing in our logs is an increase in traffic from user agents like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 12_4 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) GSA/81.0.264749124 Mobile/16G77 Safari/604.1

This is from the Google Search App v 81.0.264749124 (which appears to be using ios-webview v605.1.15). Is there any way this package can detect the GSA version versus the ios-webview version, or preferably both?

[DamonOehlman]

@haydenth despite not getting back to you until now, I've put a bit of thought into this and thinking about what we can do. I think my previous assumption that I could make a binary distinction between a bot/crawler and a "human-driven" browser was a little optimistic, as I suspect there is a lot of grey in the middle as you have pointed out.

So... what's the solution? Well, it would take a little bit of refactoring the code, but I'd propose that we would include the bot flag on the BrowserInfo returned so you could make a determination that you both detected a valid browser AND detect-browser thinks it's a bot.

Even though with this kind of refactor, I would bump the major version, I'd be making sure that detect-browser behaved in a consistent way (i.e. detected the above user agents as ios-webview). In your case (and others desiring the same functionality) you'd be able to check that bot flag and see if it was in fact a bot that made the request, and decide how you wanted to handle that.

Does this sound like a reasonable solution to you?

[haydenth]

Hey - thanks for the response. So maybe it might help if I describe the post-processing we do with data coming out of the detect-browser library. The library works 💯 in 99% of the cases but I have some special logic that grabs two things:

• Bots: Mostly Google + Baidu. Easily filterable by looking at the user-agent. I just append an is_bot flag to browser data.
• (Sub) Browsers: The main one is the GSA app but there are a few others, I think facebook has one. A surprisingly large number of our users come from these apps and some of them are really buggy (GSA currently has a really nasty bug where it mangles react apps). If you're an iOS user, download the Google App (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google/id284815942) and see how it uses ios-webview.

So I think bot and (sub) browsers are different things

[DamonOehlman]

OK cool, that all makes sense. I'll have a look at firing up an older iPhone (hopefully I can get the GSA app) and see what I can come up with.

[haydenth]

cc @ryanmchenry2 who works with me and has access to a collection of janky old phones on his desk right now