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Why is the device empty?

Issue

I want to know why the device tag is empty (or shows an empty string) on my issues, even when other tags like browser and OS are present.
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Applies To

  • All SaaS Customers

  • Error Monitoring

  • Browser JavaScript SDKs
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Resolution

For browser events, an empty Device value is expected for most desktop browsers.

Sentry derives browser, OS, and device information from the User-Agent. A typical Windows desktop User-Agent includes browser and OS details but not a specific device model, so Sentry can populate the browser and OS while leaving Device empty. For example:
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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/123.0.0.0 Safari/537.36


Some User-Agents, such as Macintosh, contain enough information for Sentry to infer a device like Mac, but that’s the exception rather than the default for desktop browsers.
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Native and mobile SDKs (Android, Cocoa, React Native, Flutter, Capacitor) can provide richer device information because they read it directly from the device or runtime.
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If you need a specific device value for browser traffic, collect it in your application and attach it using custom context.

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