Luca Passani, CTO @ScientiaMobile
November 18, 2022

WURFL Cloud, our SaaS solution for device detection, has served thousands of developers and companies over the years. But as with all tech, the time comes to move on. It’s been a solid decade of service, but the time has come to move on—and we want to explain why, what it means for you, and where to go from here.

We are “decommissioning” WURFL Cloud… 

…a term that sits somewhere between ‘stop using it’ and ‘we’re pulling the plug.’ The cutoff is December 31, 2022. After that, no new signups. Existing users will still get some runway to migrate (preferably to one of our other WURFL offerings—more on that below). In short, if you are not a WURFL Cloud user, we recommend that you don’t even consider it as an option. If you are a user already, the time to move away from it is now.

Why?

Chances are you are wondering why we are doing this, as the service has been working as advertised throughout a decade of honorable service. The main reason is that something big – and outside of our control – has changed. Google is going to freeze the User-Agent string of Android devices, and replace it with a complex HTTP dance that will lead to the presence of a different set of headers, the so-called User-Agent Client Hints. We discussed this extensively here and here.

Updating all the legacy WURFL Cloud Clients to support the new mechanism would have been costly and painful, particularly as newer and more modern on premise and SaaS WURFL solutions have been released over the years. But that’s not the only reason. Client Hints don’t travel too well through the Cloudfront load balancers, which are an indispensable part of the WURFL Cloud product. For this reason, decommissioning the WURFL Cloud and inviting its users to new solutions is the smart thing to do. 

Note: As a corollary to this, please note that existing WURFL Cloud users are likely to discover a degradation in the quality of device detection, as browsers with frozen User-Agent string hit WURFL Cloud. 

WURFL Cloud alternatives?

Pretty much all existing WURFL Products can represent an alternative to the WURFL Cloud. Which one specifically will depend on each user’s application and use case.

If you are determined on using a cloud solution that requires less maintenance to keep the API and data updated, WURFL Microservice (a product of the WURFL InFuze portfolio) is the obvious choice. The WURFL Microservice Cloud Clients are available in all popular programming languages and released with an open-source license, which should make migration simple.

But Cloud is not your only option. The on-premise solutions (both OnSite and InFuze) will make you install software and data locally, but thanks to the WURFL Updater, you won’t need to touch your application very often.

WURFL Cloud also supported very (by now) exotic languages such as Perl. If you are using the Cloud with one of those languages, you may want to consider adoption of one of the Varnish, NGINX or HAProxy WURFL Infuze API modules to inject capabilities into HTTP requests. This applies to all configurations you may be using at the moment.

This schema will recap things for you.

Finally, also consider WURFL.js, either in its Lite (i.e. free) or in its Business (i.e. Enterprise) Edition. 

Important note: you will need to configure your server to request client-hints from browsers.

WURFL Cloud is dead. Viva WURFL Cloud

We’re proud of what WURFL Cloud accomplished, and we’re excited for what’s next. If you’re unsure about which path to take, please reach out – we’re here to help make the transition as painless as possible.