ronan
Ronan Cremin leads engineering efforts at DeviceAtlas. He focuses on building device intelligence applications, such as the award-winning DeviceAtlas and DeviceAssure products. Mr. Cremin also represents DeviceAtlas at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
Latest Articles by ronan
The mysterious model K
July 14, 2023, by ronan
Those of you who pay attention to your web server log files may have noticed some curious patterns emerging over the last few months. Most websites will have seen a steady rise in devices with User-Agent headers looking something like this: Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 10; K) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/<majorVersion>.0.0.0 Mobile Safari/537.36 or like... Read More
Counterfeit mobile phones are everywhere
March 20, 2019, by ronan
A growing problem, worldwide Fake handbags, fake watches, fake news—these are all so familiar to us now that we don’t give them a moment’s thought and accept them as a matter of course. So it should come as no surpise to us that counterfeit phones are widespread also. How widespread? The EU’s Intellectual Property Office... Read More
Momemtum for PWAs builds relentlessly
June 6, 2018, by ronan
With two major developer conferences just behind us it’s worth reviewing where we are with PWAs. Microsoft added further momentum to PWAs at Build 2018 by detailing just how rich the support for PWAs will be. They aren’t doing this in half measures: A dedicated installation shortcurt from the Edge address bar Optional chromeless mode... Read More
The SIM – the tiny computer in your pocket that’s really in control
July 11, 2017, by ronan
The Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) was first introduced by the GSMA in 1987 in a farsighted move to ensure that a mobile subscriber on a GSM cellular network could maintain an identity on the network independant of a particular mobile device. While its visibility has decreased over time, the humble SIM has been an essential... Read More
Mobile web: back to the future
March 29, 2017, by ronan
In the early days of the mobile web, way back in the late late nineties and early noughties, there was only one technique available to publish web pages to mobile devices: bespoke mobile content. There was simply no way that desktop-focused content could be made to work unaltered on the mobile devices of the time, which... Read More
Adaptive web design dominates in the web’s top brands
March 23, 2017, by ronan
Five years ago we ran an analysis of how the web’s top brands delivered web content to mobile. We found that 82% of the Alexa 100 used Adaptive Web Design (AWD, or server-side adaptation) in their websites to cater to different device classes. Since we ran this analysis RWD has become decidedly mainstream, an indispensable... Read More
Serving AMP pages to all mobile users
November 10, 2016, by ronan
AMP is growing in importance in the web publishing world. Here at mobiForge we have some serious misgivings with the approach taken by Google with AMP but the speed up in page loading time is inarguable. This post describes a method for exposing AMP pages to all mobile visitors using some server-side device detection so that all mobile... Read More
Sleepwalking into a walled garden
September 14, 2016, by ronan
Here at mobiForge we’ve been broadly positive towards Google’s AMP since its launch in October 2015. It’s by no means the only way to achieve the wholesome goal of fast-loading web pages, but by providing a well-documented format to adhere to that delivers excellent performance, the web has benefitted. Google now reports that the average... Read More
The web performance impact of third-party libraries
August 3, 2016, by ronan
In many ways the ease with which one can include third-party libraries in a web page is a testament to both the design of the web and extraordinarily rich and open ecosystem around it. With a few third-party services you can transform a static HTML page into a rich interactive experience with comments, media, analytics,... Read More
Transcoders – the technology we love to hate that will never go away
July 27, 2016, by ronan
Many years ago I remember a Google product manager saying that his product, the Google mobile transcoder, was the one product that everyone wished would go away... Read More
