.android domains as referrer

[Sergei_Kalinichenko]

Hi there,

I haven't found a case which I can't explain effectively, would anybody be so kind to support me?

We noticed we have a number of .android domains as last touch channel details and marketing channel "Other Referrers". That's in line with our marketing rules, but suddenly I realized that I can't explain to myself the possible scenarios when user clicks the link, for example in gmail, and Android does not send the user to "external" browser, which I expect to maintain cookies and other image requests dimension, and instead is using some kind of in-app browse, which then may or may not support this footprint stuff.

So, my question is, what might be a reasons that these visits are followed with one and only identified referring domain = '*.android'? and link query string is lost?

[yuhuisg]

I had observed such referrers in the past, and concluded that they were coming from the in-app webview. I don't have a good explanation of why it happens, but the pattern was fairly clear to make that connection.

[Jennifer_Dungan]

I agree that this looks like webview traffic from apps, but I am also confused as to why the query strings would be lost... 

Do you have proxy testing tools like Charles or Fiddler set up? Those can be used from more than just internal app testing... you should be able to test opening up an email in the gmail app, click on a link and load your website in the webview. You might be able to see if something weird is happening.

[Sergei_Kalinichenko]

Hi Jennifer,

No, I don't have Charles or Fiddler on my side. I'll reach out to QA team to see if they can debug it for me