Mobile Device going into 'Unknown generic android mobile' | Community
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V_Sirish_Kaushik1
July 5, 2023
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Mobile Device going into 'Unknown generic android mobile'

  • July 5, 2023
  • 4 replies
  • 9102 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?

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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....

4 replies

Jennifer_Dungan
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
Jennifer_DunganCommunity Advisor and Adobe ChampionAccepted solution
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
July 5, 2023

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_Kaushik1
July 5, 2023

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
Community Advisor and Adobe Champion
July 5, 2023

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
Adobe Employee
July 18, 2023

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.

July 27, 2023

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

January 25, 2024

Hello,

We are still ecountering this problem and the volume of "Unknown Generic Android mobile" keeps increasing since May 2023.

Do you have any update on this subject ? Is it a problem with Adobe and how it processes data or does it have to do with Chrome user agent reduction, since Chrome 110 version ?

Some reference on what I'm talking about : https://developer.chrome.com/blog/user-agent-reduction-android-model-and-version.


@jennifer_dungan Are we able to reopen this discussion item? We are still seeing the heavy majority of Android traffic coming in categorized as generic. This is about the only thread I can find on this topic. Any updates are appreciated. Thanks!

November 2, 2024

t

November 2, 2024

thanks