Xamarin WebView request desktop site - mobile

Question

Is there a way to ask, via C#, the iOS and Android WebView components to request the desktop sites?

Answer 1

You need to do this per platform
Android
In Android you have to implement a custom renderer. Add this into your Android code:
// this line directly ubleow usings, before namespace declaration
[assembly:ExportRenderer(typeof(WebView), typeof(DesktopWebViewRenderer))]
// this in your namespace
public class DesktopWebViewRenderer : WebViewRenderer
{
protected override void OnElementChanged(ElementChangedEventArgs<WebView> e)
{
base.OnElementChanged(e);
Control.Settings.UserAgentString = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0";
}
}
iOS
Xamarin Forms is using UIWebView, so you have to call
NSUserDefaults.StandardUserDefaults.RegisterDefaults(new NSDictionary("UserAgent",
"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_3) AppleWebKit/537.75.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.3 Safari/7046A194A"));
some where in your startup code. E.g. in FinishedLaunching of your AppDelegate.

Answer 2

Set the user agent string appropriately. There is no way to do this directly in Xamarin Forms, you would need to write a custom renderer to do that.
iOS UIWebView
NSUserDefaults.StandardUserDefaults.RegisterDefaults(["UserAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_3) AppleWebKit/537.75.14 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0.3 Safari/7046A194A"]);
iOS9+ WKWebView
web.CustomUserAgent = #"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/45.0.2454.99 Safari/537.36";
Android
string agent = "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.4) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/4.0";
web.Settings.UserAgentString = agent;