Absolutely. The moment it became clear to me was back when Google completely broke gmail and search for WebOS devices. It served the most rudimentary, broken WAP like version of Gmail and a stripped down version of search. Gmail was basically unusable.
The fix? as simple as changing the browser's user agent to look like Android/Chrome.
> The fix? as simple as changing the browser's user agent to look like Android/Chrome.
I'm not defending Google here, but once I worked for a company whose web support strategy consisted of explicitly supporting a specific subset of browsers, and have a user-agent allowlist to pick if a request loaded the current version of the page or a legacy, feature incomplete but broadly supported version. The guiding principle was that we would have to draw the line in the sand regarding which browsers we'd cover in our test matrix, and instead of risking subjecting users who used unsupported browser to broken experiences then it was preferable that we assured they would experience an old but bulletproof version of it.
We started off by showing a "this browser is not supported, please upgrade" page, until some other department in our company complained up and down the org tree because they used thin clients with outdated browsers. Thus instead of showing a "please upgrade" page we fed the old version, and everyone was happy.
I see how this looks like intentionally feeding a degraded experience to subsets of users, but having been in a decision-making process that led to the same outcome, let me assure you there are real-world scenarios where this outcome does not originate in malice or any ulterior motive.
The users affected by this case were at the tip of a very long tail of unsupported user agents. Those who want to circumvent the issue can either upgrade or resort to tricks like faking user agents. The key take here is that we could not possibly support all browsers or the old version, so for the very rare cases we kept the lights on in a very old and unmaintained version of the app. In my company there was no sneaky ulterior motive, it was just that we couldn't afford maintaining obscure platforms that, even if we really wanted to, we couldn't possibly test.
They did the same multiple times for Windows Mobile. They support iOS because iOS only ships for Apple devices, it isn't really a competitor in the OS space. But they are absolutely brutal towards any company which might offer a way out for OEMs from the Google prison.
The fix? as simple as changing the browser's user agent to look like Android/Chrome.