How to get the device platform on Windows 10

Question

Since one release binary will run on pc, xbox and phones, I need a way to fetch the device type on runtime.

It is doable by checking with the ApiInformation for present types, methods etc., but I believe there should be a more reliable way.

Answer 1

Currently (with the preview tools released 23-Mar-2015) there isn't an easy way to do this, other than (as you mention) using the ApiInformation methods to detect implementations of things that only exist on the specific platform you're after.

It would be nice if there were some helpers to do this and if none are in the final tooling I'm sure some will be created by helpful people in the community.

However, there is a really good reason not to have this in that it encourages broad assumptions about the device.

If it was possible to say "Am I running on a phone?" then if you got the response 'Yes' then it would be easy to make assumptions about what was possible with that device but not all phones have the same capabilities.
It looks like there will be a "mobile" version of Windows 10 for both phones and small tablets. If you were able to say "am I the 'mobile' version?" then again that wouldn't potentially answer all your questions and you'd have to still check individual API availabilities as the capabilities of a cheap tablet and a high end phone could be vastly different. (The inclusion of physical buttons on the device and the ability to make phone calls are two obvious examples.) Extending this further there are plenty of scenarios where you'd treat different platforms the same as the functionality exists on all of them. In this scenario you're code would be better of saying "Is such and such API available?", rather than saying "Am I running on desktop, Xbox or SurfaceHub?".
The IOT platform will likely further complicate this due to the range of functionality and capabilities different IOT devices will have available.

There are very few scenarios where you want to know the platform you're running on and not whether a specific API is available. Hopefully, by only exposing API availability Microsoft are encouraging developers to think about checking for what they actually need, rather than relying on broad, potentially incomplete, classifications of devices.

Just as with web development where you don't know what platform or browser you are running on, you shouldn't detect the platform and make assumptions about what capabilities that device will therefore have, you should detect if the specific capability you require is supported/enabled on the device before using it or exposing associated UI in your app.

Answer 2

[Edit July 3 to replace //build-era information with current information]

Although you can try and infer the device you're on by using the ApiInformation APIs to detect APIs, this is a very bad solution since APIs can be added to devices over time. Please don't do that; your future self (or your replacement ;-) ) will thank you.

If you really do need to programmatically detect the device family that you're running on (and in most cases you don't) then you can use AnalyticsInfo.VersionInfo.DeviceFamliy. This returns a string for which there is no published standard set of values, because device families could be introduced or retired at any time.

If you want to provide different resources per device-family (strings, images, XAML files, HTML pages, etc.) then you don't need to detect the device-family in code; instead you can use an MRT qualifier DeviceFamily (such as Logo.DeviceFamily-Mobile.png). Just make sure you always have a fallback resource (image, string, etc) for use when the app is running on a device family you've never heard of before. And don't fall into the trap of assuming things like "Desktop requires higher-res assets than Mobile" because that is often not true.

Answer 3

It seems there is a new API to detect Device Family: Windows.System.Profile.AnalyticsInfo.VersionInfo.DeviceFamily

You can find more information here: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/dn705767.aspx

Updated:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/windows.system.profile.analyticsversioninfo.aspx

Answer 4

Additionally to support the scenario Alan describes in his comment you can check for a Contract rather than a specific type as this indicates a block of related functionality. There is one such contract for the Windows Phone specific APIs - I described in here http://inthehand.com/2015/03/26/determine-if-running-on-windows-phone-from-a-uap-application/ Since this contract provides compatibility APIs for current Windows Phone apps we can assume at this point that it won't be implemented in small tablets as they won't have this. Obviously since the OS or APIs are not final this is not set in stone yet. This is a useful thing to know for Windows Phone especially if during the transition you want to cross promote legacy WP apps only on WP devices. For custom IoT devices I would check availability at the API level.

Answer 5

You can specify device family exclusive resources and views using specially named folders: (http://www.sharpgis.net/post/2015/04/01/Creating-DeviceFamily-specific-layouts-in-a-Universal-App).

You could, for the "advertising only same family apps" scenario described above, place a JSON or XML file in that device family's folder and fetch it at runtime using the storage API's.

Answer 6

I use this for phone (mobile):

if (Windows.System.Profile.AnalyticsInfo.VersionInfo.DeviceFamily == "Windows.Mobile")
{
      // code for phone 
}
else
{
      // other code
}

extample is here

Answer 7

This is just repeating one of the previous answers which suggests using Windows.System.Profile.AnalyticsInfo.VersionInfo.DeviceFamily but I thought I'd include the complete code for a check:

// ----------------------------------------------------------------------
// IsRunningOnXbox
// Determines whether or not the game is running on an xbox console
bool IsRunningOnXbox()
{
    // Skip if already checked
    static bool bChecked = false;
    static bool bRunningOnXbox = false;
    if (bChecked)
        return bRunningOnXbox;

    // Retrieve the platform device family
    Platform::String^ strVersionInfoDeviceFamily = Windows::System::Profile::AnalyticsInfo::VersionInfo->DeviceFamily;
    if (strVersionInfoDeviceFamily != nullptr)
    {
        // Check to see if the device belongs to the xbox family
        std::wstring strDeviceFamily = strVersionInfoDeviceFamily->Data();
        std::transform(strDeviceFamily.begin(), strDeviceFamily.end(), strDeviceFamily.begin(), ::tolower);
        if (strDeviceFamily.find(L"xbox") != std::wstring::npos)
            bRunningOnXbox = true;
    }

    // Check complete
    bChecked = true;

    // Return whether or not the host platform is xbox
    return bRunningOnXbox;
}

I do agree with Chuck's comment that this is probably not what AnalyticsInfo is intended for... but at the same time, we're talking about the xbox - a device with a single manufacturer who is also responsible for the OS. So in my mind at least, this seems pretty safe. Plus, if you wrap it like this, it's incredibly easy to swap in a different check should something better come along.