The gap
Our tracking consistently reports more tablet users than Google Analytics. The root cause: iPads.
How iPads “hide” from GA
Since iPadOS 13+, Safari on iPad sends a desktop User-Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 ...Nothing in this string identifies it as an iPad.
Google Analytics, by contrast, determines device category from the User-Agent string alone. It sees “Macintosh”, has no way to check maxTouchPoints, and classifies the visit as Desktop. This is why GA systematically undercounts iPad tablets.
Our detection method
Our tracking runs client-side JavaScript that checks navigator.maxTouchPoints. iPads report maxTouchPoints = 5, while Mac desktops report 0 or 1.
This lets us correctly identify iPads before sending device_type=tablet to the server.
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