Why is the exact model of iPhones not available?

In the Models analysis, you will often see a large proportion of devices attributed simply to iPhone, without more details on the exact model (iPhone 11, iPhone XR, etc.).

This happens because the precise model cannot always be identified from the User Agent (UA) sent by Apple. Apple’s UA strings have become increasingly generic and, starting with iOS 12.2, they no longer consistently include enough information to differentiate specific iPhone models. When the UA does not provide model-level detail, Piano Analytics can only display the generic value iPhone.

Here’s an example of a UA sent by Apple for an event that results in iPhone as the device (technical name), without information to differentiate the model:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 15_3_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/15.3 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

Can I get more precise iPhone model information?

Not from the standard Apple User Agent alone when it is generic. If your use case requires model-level identification, you would need to capture and send an additional device-specific property as part of your implementation (for example, via your app or site logic), rather than relying on UA parsing.

Because collecting device-specific details can introduce implementation complexity and privacy/compliance considerations, it’s recommended to review this approach with your implementation team.