I use a phone application from Mercedes Benz that stopped working a week ago. Mercedes told me today that it will now only work if I have Chrome browser instead of my usual Duck Duck Go. Naturally I do not want to change to Chrome spyware, so is there any way to disguise DDG to resemble Chrome? I know of agent switchers for desk computers but I can find nothing similar for a phone.
Have it installed but firewalled from the internet does not work?
Or this was about WebView?
Maybe using chromium ungoogled one may help? Or maybe manually changing from about:config the agent may help?
The error shown refers to DNS fault and is apparently a change brought about by Mercedes. They were emphatic that only Chrome will now allow registration of my account, and only after registration will the app work. I am not sure I believe Mercedes is being entirely truthfull in view of their shoddy customer support so I am trying to find a way round the problem.
As for Webview, I have no idea what that is.
There is no Chromium in Playstore or F-Droid. I installed and tried Firefox to no avail.
Update: I tried to register with Mercedes from a Chromebook i.e. using Chrome, and got the same result about DNS thus proving that Mercedes is lying, just as I suspected.
I can’t say the problem is solved so I’ll leave the query open in case others have a solution or a similar problem.
Dunno if using the chromebook browser is considered the same as using the app. Just in case it isn’t, maybe trying a chromium based browser on the phone? There are several forks that are supposed to be better privacy wise. I sometimes use Brave for these situations but there is also Bromite. These 2 I know are open source, there are probably others I can’t think of right now.
https://brave.com/download/
https://github.com/bromite/bromite
It should be possible to set a user agent string in dev console if you want to tinker with it but I think the default in Brave is to send a chrome string, maybe that would be enough to fool the app if this were (temporarily) set to be your default browser?
FIRST - TEST1: TRY using gChrome (as Mercedes insists) to log-in with them, from any desktop. They may reject login, coz it’s a different device than your fone …
BUT …IFF it worx, then read on…
Any browser has a “user agent” string (text) entry to blab to website (as above)
“I am this kind of browser”.
We can change a browser’s “user agent” string and thereby “spoof” some different browser.
TEST2: NOW … USING BRAVE (same dsktop?)…
Follow instrux on this handy howTo
IFF that WORX: Cross yer fingers the droidBrave offers DeveloperTools, and modify the droidBrave’s UserAgent string.
Is the above (above) example UserAgent string “…bot…” really what we want?
Well I finally circumvented logging in at the Mercedes Portal website from a variety of browsers and a variety of operating systems, by logging in via the phone app during the two seconds it is available on screen, so my problem is solved. Although the problem did not concern F-Droid I appreciate everyones efforts to help me get round it using the phone. A combination of Mercedes clunky website and my ignorance almost defeated me.
Mercedes Benz. Nice cars; abysmal customer service. Time now to get rid of all but one of the browsers from the phone, and to investigate changing user agent for future reference. Thanks again.
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