Xamarin WebView request desktop site

Question

Is there a way to ask, via C#, the iOS and Android WebView components to request the desktop sites?

For iOS: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32764728/request-desktop-sites-using-wkwebview-in-ios — Sven-Michael Stübe, May 03 '16 at 21:37
For Android: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8309796/want-to-load-desktop-version-in-my-webview-using-uastring — Sven-Michael Stübe, May 03 '16 at 21:38
Thank you Sven-Michael. New to Xamarin.forms here. How would I go about calling these functions in the .iOS and .Android versions of the app, respectively? — Ming K, May 03 '16 at 21:40

Sven-Michael Stübe · Accepted Answer · 2016-05-03T21:58:35.117

You need to do this per platform

Android

In Android you have to implement a custom renderer. Add this into your Android code:

// this line directly ubleow usings, before namespace declaration
[assembly:ExportRenderer(typeof(WebView), typeof(DesktopWebViewRenderer))]

// this in your namespace
public class DesktopWebViewRenderer : WebViewRenderer
{
    protected override void OnElementChanged(ElementChangedEventArgs<WebView> e)
    {
        base.OnElementChanged(e);

        Control.Settings.UserAgentString = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0";
    }
}

iOS

Xamarin Forms is using UIWebView, so you have to call

NSUserDefaults.StandardUserDefaults.RegisterDefaults(new NSDictionary("UserAgent",
            "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_3) AppleWebKit/537.75.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.3 Safari/7046A194A"));

some where in your startup code. E.g. in FinishedLaunching of your AppDelegate.

Thanks man.. It helped me.. its 11: 52 PM here in India.. Good night — Thameem, Feb 25 '21 at 18:23

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered May 03 '16 at 21:48

Set the user agent string appropriately. There is no way to do this directly in Xamarin Forms, you would need to write a custom renderer to do that.

iOS UIWebView

NSUserDefaults.StandardUserDefaults.RegisterDefaults(["UserAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_3) AppleWebKit/537.75.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.3 Safari/7046A194A"]);

iOS9+ WKWebView

web.CustomUserAgent = @"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.99 Safari/537.36";

Android

string agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0";
web.Settings.UserAgentString = agent;

Xamarin WebView request desktop site

2 Answers2