Solved

Mobile Device going into 'Unknown generic android mobile'

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
July 5, 2023
4 replies
9100 views

Since last few months, more and more mobile device data is going into 'Unknown Generic Android Mobile'. We have tried enabling the high entropy flag, but we are not really seeing any progress in dev data. Any suggestions on how to tackle it?

Analytics

This post is no longer active and is closed to new replies. Need help? Start a new post to ask your question.

Best answer by Jennifer_Dungan

I am seeing this too... when I break it down by operating systems, it's mostly Android 10...

If I look at the opposite, Android 10 broken down by Mobile Device Type, the top item is the generic device...

When I look at January vs Last Month, the growth in Android 10 seems way too high for an older Android OS...

This makes me suspicious that "Generic Android 10" is the new default bot identification, sort of like "IE6" was a few years ago... I have no solid evidence to support that at this time however.... but generally you don't see mass adoption of older OSs like that...

However, I wouldn't immediately action ignoring this data in case my suspicion is wrong... as I said, at this time it's more of a gut feeling....

Jennifer_Dungan

Accepted solution

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

I am seeing this too... when I break it down by operating systems, it's mostly Android 10...

If I look at the opposite, Android 10 broken down by Mobile Device Type, the top item is the generic device...

When I look at January vs Last Month, the growth in Android 10 seems way too high for an older Android OS...

This makes me suspicious that "Generic Android 10" is the new default bot identification, sort of like "IE6" was a few years ago... I have no solid evidence to support that at this time however.... but generally you don't see mass adoption of older OSs like that...

However, I wouldn't immediately action ignoring this data in case my suspicion is wrong... as I said, at this time it's more of a gut feeling....

V_Sirish_Kaushik1Author

Yess, we are observing this Android 10 spike as well. Please let me know if you are able to figure out a solution for this.

Jennifer_Dungan

Community Advisor and Adobe Champion

Will do.. though at this time my thinking is implementing something like a custom code to try and identify bots based on behaviour...

Sort of like a reverse identification...

If the user:

scrolls
hovers
clicks
etc

then flag them with a true (and stop processing to avoid running a lot of detection scripts)

Then create an exclusion segment for users that aren't "true"...

The problem will be trying to not throw out screen readers and users accessing through other assistive technologies...

Basically taking Adobe's "bot detection plugin" that only works on desktop, but making it work way better 😛

https://experienceleague.adobe.com/docs/analytics/implementation/vars/plugins/websitebot.html?lang=en

FarazHusain

Adobe Employee

Hey All, A bug has been logged at Adobe's end related to client hints where in Device is not being queried correctly. The team is already working on fixing it.

R

RakeshMMT

@farazhusain - Any update on this? I am facing this too. Please help to fix this asap.

Biggsy50

Hey All,

This has been fixed. You should not see Unknown Generic in Mobile Device going forward.

FYI - for my large UK client's website the 'Unknown generic android mobile' Mobile Device Type values dropped right down on Monday August 7th ... but still make up 7.7% of mobile traffic (8th - 17th August). This compares to 49% in July before your changes.

Of this 7.7% of traffic:

Android 10 = 73%
Android 13.0.0 = 13%
Android 11 = 11%
Android 12 = 2%
Android 11 = 0.8%

t

thanks

Sign up

Login with SSO

Login to the community

Login with SSO

Scanning file for viruses.

This file cannot be downloaded