How to Detect iOS ≥ 26

Starting with Safari on iOS 26, you can no longer rely on the User-Agent string to determine iOS version. This issue is because WebKit (the underlying engine developed by Apple that powers all browsers on iOS) now freezes the reported iOS version at 18.6:

• Safari on iOS/iPadOS/visionOS 26: "user agent string no longer lists the current version of the operating system"🡥 —Webkit Blog

INFO

An example of User-Agent string on iOS 18.6:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.6 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

Meanwhile the User-Agent string on iOS 26:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

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TIP

Since UAParser.js version 2.0.6, the iOS version will be correctly detected as 26.x instead of 18.6. Whereas for version 2.0.5 and below, you can use a temporary workaround like this:

import { UAParser } from 'ua-parser-js';
import { BrowserName, OSName } from 'ua-parser-js/enums';

function getiOSVersion (ua) {
    const { browser, os } = UAParser(ua);
    if (browser.name  == BrowserName.SAFARI_MOBILE &&
        browser.major == '26' &&
        os.name       == OSName.IOS &&
        os.version    == '18.6') {
            return '26';
    } else {
            return os.version;
    }
}

const safari18 = "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/18.6 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1";
const safari26 = "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 18_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/26.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1"

console.log(getiOSVersion(safari18)); // 18.6
console.log(getiOSVersion(safari26)); // 26