Should I use mobile or desktop User-Agents for scraping?

Choosing between mobile and desktop User-Agents depends on your target and goals.

Desktop User-Agents (most common):

Advantages:

  • Sites often serve more complete HTML on desktop
  • Easier to parse full-featured desktop layouts
  • Better for scraping comprehensive data
  • Most scraping tools default to desktop

Example: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/120.0.0.0

Mobile User-Agents:

Advantages:

  • Simpler HTML structure (easier to parse)
  • Smaller page sizes (faster, less bandwidth)
  • Some sites have mobile-only features
  • Better for mobile app API scraping

Example: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 17_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15_

When to use mobile:

  • The site has a dedicated mobile version with simpler markup
  • You're scraping mobile-specific content or apps
  • Reducing bandwidth costs is a priority
  • Desktop version requires heavy JavaScript

When to use desktop:

  • You need comprehensive data only available on desktop version
  • The mobile site is feature-limited
  • Desktop layout is easier to parse
  • Most standard scraping scenarios

Testing both:

Many sites serve different content to mobile vs desktop. Always test both to see which gives you:

  • Better data coverage
  • Simpler HTML structure
  • Fewer anti-bot challenges
  • Better performance

Responsive sites:

Modern responsive sites may serve identical HTML with CSS differences. In these cases, User-Agent choice matters less for content but may still affect anti-bot systems.

Mixed approach:

Some scrapers use desktop User-Agents for initial navigation and mobile User-Agents for API endpoints that expect mobile clients.

Try our User Agent Generator →

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