iPhone WebApps, is there a way to detect how it was loaded? Home Screen vs Safari?

Question

I have an iPhone Web App, and I\'m interested in detecting if the app was loaded either from:

1. iPhone Safari
2. iPhone installed web app (via the add to m

Answer 1

I'm not sure how far back this behavior goes, but iOS will present different UserAgent strings to the server which can be used to detect if the page is being requested by a webapp or safari browser.

Safari Browser

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/8.0 Mobile/12B436 Safari/600.1.4

Home Screen Button/Web App

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 8_1_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/600.1.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Mobile/12B436

Notice it does not include 'Safari' in the UserAgent. I've confirmed that this behavior goes back to at least iOS 7, but I'd imagine even further.

So you can test for the presence of iPhone or iPad in the UserAgent string and lack of Safari to detect that it's been opened from the Home screen.