Mobile Device Detection: WURFL and UAProf

If you do any kind of development for mobile devices, you'll soon stagger into the minefield of browser and device detection.

Now, this is quite a different sort of challenge to that faced on the desktop web. On the desktop we have maybe one browser worth using, plus a whole lot of people using Internet Explorer, along with a handful of computer programmers who, bewilderingly, persist in using Firefox.

Ok, light-hearted browser snobbery and a few CSS hacks aside, the point is that these days, you basically know where you stand with desktop browsers.

By contrast, when we turn to mobile development, we find we're up against quite literally thousands of subtly and not-so-subtly different devices, and countless combinations of device, firmware and operating system versions. How can we get around this staggering complexity in order to find out the user's screen size? What markup can they handle? What ringtone formats can they accept? How about Java applications and games?

This is where WURFL comes in. WURFL is a free, open-source database of mobile devices and their specifications and capabilities. It is as close to a "standard" solution to this problem as currently exists.