Device Detection Made Easy with React and Mobile-Detect
When building a website, understanding the device a user is viewing from is crucial. With responsive design, we can create consistent pages across various devices. Moreover, we can render different content based on the device type. A great example of this is the Git download page, which automatically detects the user’s operating system and presents the relevant version.
Our Project: Detecting Device Types
In this tutorial, we’ll build a React app that detects the user’s device type and renders different content accordingly. Our app will have a button that displays different text based on the user’s operating system. We’ll use the mobile-detect library to achieve this.
Understanding the User Agent String
When a client requests a web page, information about the request is sent over in the HTTP header, including the user agent string. This string holds information about the browser, operating system, and device type. However, the user agent string is not very helpful in its bare form. We need to parse it to make sense of the information.
Utilizing Mobile-Detect.js
Mobile-detect.js is a JavaScript library that helps us determine a user’s operating system. With this information, we can render different content for each detected system. We’ll create a simple download page named “Kingo” with a button that displays different text based on the user’s operating system.
Setting Up Our React App
We’ll create a new React app using create-react-app and install the necessary dependencies. Our app will have two components: App.js and Button.js. We’ll also use a CDN to access mobile-detect.js.
Creating Our Components
We’ll start by creating our root React component, App.js. This component will hold the hero image and the button component. Next, we’ll create our button component, Button.js, which will display different text based on the user’s operating system.
Styling Our Page
We’ll add some basic styling to our page using Flexbox to align the hero image and button beside each other.
Detecting Devices with MobileDetect
We’ll create a custom script inside the public folder called script.js. This script will use the MobileDetect() object to detect the user’s device type and update the button text accordingly.
Viewing the Result
We’ll use the Chrome DevTool to emulate different devices and see how our app responds. We can select different devices from the dropdown menu, and the button text will update accordingly.
Wrapping Up
In this tutorial, we’ve learned how to detect the device type of a user viewing our React app and render different content accordingly. We’ve used the mobile-detect library to parse the user agent string and retrieve the necessary information. The source code for this tutorial can be obtained from this GitHub repository.