How to Request a Desktop Version of a Webpage Using Uiwebview in Swift 3.0

How can I request a desktop version of a webpage using UIWebView in Swift 3.0?

A WKWebView should solve your problem - you can define it in your code. Do this:

var webView : WKWebView!
override func loadView() {
    super.loadView()

    let config = WKWebViewConfiguration()
    webView = WKWebView(frame: self.view.frame, configuration: config)
    self.webView!.uiDelegate = self
    webView.customUserAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.109 Safari/537.36"
    //load URL here
    let url = NSURL(string: "https://stackoverflow.com/")!
    webView.load(URLRequest(url: url as URL))
    self.view.addSubview(webView)


}

Request desktop site WKWebview not working in Swift 4

Here's my tested code:

class ViewController: UIViewController {

    var webview: WKWebView?

    override func viewDidLoad() {
        super.viewDidLoad()
        // Do any additional setup after loading the view, typically from a nib.

        createWebView()
        if let url = URL(string: "https://quora.com") {
            load(url: url)
        }
    }

    private func createWebView() {
        let config = WKWebViewConfiguration()
        let webview = WKWebView(frame: self.view.frame, configuration: config)
        webview.uiDelegate = self
        webview.navigationDelegate = self
        self.webview = webview
        self.view.addSubview(webview)
    }

    private func load(url: URL) {
        var request = URLRequest(url: url)
        let userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_10_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.109 Safari/537.36"
        request.addValue(userAgent, forHTTPHeaderField: "User-Agent")
        webview?.load(request)
    }
}

extension ViewController: WKNavigationDelegate {
    func webView(_ webView: WKWebView, didFinish navigation: WKNavigation!) {
        print("\(#function)")
    }

    func webView(_ webView: WKWebView, didFail navigation: WKNavigation!, withError error: Error) {
        print("\(#function): \(error)")
    }
}

extension ViewController: WKUIDelegate {

}

And the resulting page:

Cheers!

UIWebView load desktop version of website not Mobile version

It deppends on the web, but you can try to change the user agent to make the server think it's a desktop browser

To change the "UserAgent" default value run this code when your app starts:

NSDictionary *dictionary = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys:@"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:25.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/25.0", @"UserAgent", nil];
[[NSUserDefaults standardUserDefaults] registerDefaults:dictionary];  

How to request desktop site in Swift programmatically (without UIWebView)?

Depends on server logic, but in most cases it's enough to set up userAgent Header in you request:

let url = URL(string:"https://google.com")!
var request = URLRequest(url: url)
let userAgent = "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.12 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/11.1 Safari/605.1.12"
request.addValue(userAgent, forHTTPHeaderField: "User-Agent")

let task = URLSession.shared.dataTask(with: request) { (data, response, error) in
 // Process reponse
}
task.resume()

Force SFSafariViewController to load the desktop version of a website

As of iOS 9, sadly no. Your best bet might be to create your own web view and use a different user agent as @vizllx suggests in the comments.

UIWebView Desktop Website Won't Work

After checking user agent, https://web.whatsapp.com checks that client supports indexeddb, probably by some JavaScript. It's easy to notice - if you will trace all redirects your app performed, then you will find redirect to https://web.whatsapp.com/browsers.html?missing=indexeddb. In my case, I've used simple NSURLProtocol subclass to log all redirects. Sadly, NSURLProtocol no longer works with WKWebView.

UIWebView doesn't implement indexeddb at all. As far as I know, there is no easy way to implement indexeddb support myself.

You can easily check indexeddb support by accessing html5test.com in UIWebView. You will see something like:

But WKWebView does support indexeddb:

I've checked web.whatsapp.com loading in iOS WKWebView with custom user agent, taken from my desktop Safari using http://whatsmyuseragent.com, and it shows QR code as you expected. Moreover, migration to WKWebView will add some bonuses like improved performance and stability.

I've used following code for my test:

#import <WebKit/WebKit.h>

@interface ViewController () <WKNavigationDelegate>
@end

@implementation ViewController

- (void)viewDidLoad {
    [super viewDidLoad];

    self.webView = [[WKWebView alloc] initWithFrame:self.view.bounds];
    self.webView.customUserAgent = @"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_5) AppleWebKit/601.6.17 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.1.1 Safari/601.6.17";
    [self.view addSubview:self.webView];

    self.webView.navigationDelegate = self;

    NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://web.whatsapp.com"];
    NSURLRequest *urlRequest = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
    [self.webView loadRequest:urlRequest];
}

- (void)webView:(WKWebView *)webView decidePolicyForNavigationAction:(nonnull WKNavigationAction *)navigationAction decisionHandler:(nonnull void (^)(WKNavigationActionPolicy))decisionHandler {
    decisionHandler(WKNavigationActionPolicyAllow);
}

@end

Although it's Objective-C, it should be pretty straightforward to convert into swift.

UPD:

Reason why you have blank view with WKWebView is transport security. Either use https://web.whatsapp.com as URL (note HTTPS instead of HTTP), or add NSAllowsArbitraryLoads: YES in your application info.plist

Force UIWebView to load mobile version of website, like Safari does

I forgot to set the constraints for the UIWebView, which caused the content to be rendered wrongly. I don't know how that's relevant, but constraining the UIWebView seems to not only render the content correctly but also display the mobile site.

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