Change iPhone user agent

Visit websites from your iPhone without being redirected to iPhone version of the site

By default your user agent on the iPhone is something like

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2 like Mac OS X; ja-jp) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5G77 Safari/525.20

Some websites might have a "lite" version for your iPhone and you will miss some functionalities.

It has been reported by various sites that if you change the user agent of your iPhone you will get the original webpage instead of the "lite" version.

These steps has been tester on v1.1.4 and following them on a different version might not work/harm your phone.

Step 1) SFTP or SSH into iPhone and Grab the following files:

/System/Library/Frameworks/Webkit.framework/Webkit /System/Library/Frameworks/Webkit.framework/Info.plist

Step 2) Open the 'Webkit' file in a hex editor. You need to find this line:

Mozilla/5.0 (%@; U; CPU iPhone OS %@ like Mac OS X; %@) AppleWebKit/%@ (KHTML, like Gecko) %@

and change that line to

%*0.*0@

In 0xED the changed line looks like this

Step 3) You need to convert the Info.plist into standard XML format. If you have a Mac you can do this in the terminal using the following command (make sure to change your file path to wherever you have the file saved):

plutil -convert xml1 /Users/username/Desktop/Info.plist

If you aren't on a Mac you will need to install the Perl Framework to run the plutil script in command prompt (available here: http://scw.us/iPhone/plutil). This script has a slightly different syntax but obviously the goal is to convert this file to plain xml so you can edit it.

Step 4) Now open the converted Info.plist and look for these lines:

<key>CFBundleVersion</key> <string>420.1</string>

And simply change the string value to whatever user agent you want. Mine looks like this:

<key>CFBundleVersion</key> <string>Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.2; U; Series60/3.1 NokiaN95/21.0.016; Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLD(-1.1) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413</string>

Step 5) Convert Info.plist back to binary with this command in your terminal (OSX) (again, make sure to change your file path to wherever you have the file saved):

plutil -convert binary1 /Users/username/Desktop/Info.plist

Step 6) Upload the two modified files back onto your phone into the same directory you found them.

Step 7) Reset your phone and test out your new user agent by going to something like useragent.org

Alternatively you can use a handy SBSettings widget by the name of User Agent Faker(UAFAKER) now in Cydia.

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