After the official release of the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus at the end of September, alongside the latest version of iOS a couple days before (handy), the data team at 51Degrees were able to process the available User-Agents across all platforms.
Here are a couple examples of User-Agents we have detected since the launch of the new iPhones and iOS 11 Operating System;
An iPhone 8 User-Agent whilst accessing Facebook -
A standard iOS 11.0.3 User-Agent -
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 11_0_3 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/604.1.38 (KHTML, like Gecko)
For each iPhone/iPad release we know that Apple assign identifiers to each model, these help match User-Agents to the correct device. These are the latest identifiers recorded;
iPhone 8 - 10.1/10.4
iPhone 8 Plus - 10.2/10.5
iPhone X - 10.3/10.6
This previous article tackles how Apple obfuscate the device information within the User-Agent. Even without the necessary information from the User-Agent, the JavaScript that runs in a live environment will allow for identification of the iPhone model via the screen size.
With the iPhone 8 releasing after the Samsung Galaxy S8 in summer, and just before the Google Pixel 2 in October, it will be interesting to see which flagship comes out on top over the next year. In the upcoming months we will look back at the popularity of iOS 11 against Android 8, do people still care for upgrading their operating system, or is it only really relevant for pre-installed devices?
