Screen Resolutions

meisterleise · December 24, 2018, 11:09am

There are serveral visits by devices wich are shown with a wrong screen resolution. Mostly mobile phones with high HD resolutions are shown with “320x480” or “360x640”.

Lukas · December 25, 2018, 1:52pm

Hi,

They are showing the “correct” screen resolution, just not the one you would expect.

Most mobile devices report a smaller resultion as you wouldn’t want a 12px font not actually be 12px high (which would be tiny at Full HD).

As you can see here, Matomo records the result of

window.screen.height
window.screen.width

github.com

matomo-org/matomo/blob/08d623c7ee5b67d779454f179bfacc71a295ab73/js/piwik.js#L5631-L5633

      
        
            var width = parseInt(screenAlias.width, 10);
            var height = parseInt(screenAlias.height, 10);
            browserFeatures.res = parseInt(width, 10) + 'x' + parseInt(height, 10);

You may also want to take a look at:

github.com/matomo-org/matomo

Wrong device resolution (almost always 360x640)

opened 12:08AM - 31 Mar 17 UTC

closed 04:24PM - 10 Sep 17 UTC

ghost

answered

I've noticed that there are an excessive number of devices with resolution 360x6…40, which is obviously wrong. This resolution made me even more suspicious that something is wrong, because it appears with devices that run some high-end devices with relatively recent Android versions, which seems impossible that they actually use such low resolution screens. Upon further investigation, I found that indeed the 360x640 is completely wrong. For example, an HTC One M8 device running Android 6 Marshmallow with a resolution of 1080x1920 is reported as 360x640. Same problem with the Samsung Galaxy S7 running Android 6.0.1 with a resolution of 1440x2560, again reported as 360x640.

github.com/matomo-org/matomo

Record real device resolution and devicepixelratio

opened 04:39PM - 23 Feb 17 UTC

m0uH

Enhancement

I think it's really confusing if UHD devices like 4k monitors and smartphones ge…t listed under visitor devices with the "wrong" resolution. As stated in #10296 it does make sense from a website point of view but in this way you can't differentiate between HiDPI devices and normal devices. E.g. it could be worth or necessary to provide images on a website with higher resolutions if more and more users with HiDPI displays are going to visit a website. With the current state this could not be tracked. A solution could be to simply record both, the real screen resolution, which should also be presented under the device informations, and the "actual" resolution / viewport size.

and this plugin that also records the screen pixel density:

meisterleise · December 25, 2018, 2:14pm

Thanks for your answer, although I can’t follow this.

For me just counts the result: A visit with a smartphone with 1920 x 1080 pixel is shown as 640 x 360 px.
Sorry, this feels wrong for me.

Lukas · December 25, 2018, 2:31pm

Hi,

To explain it differently:

Your phone has a screen resulution of 1920x1080px, but if you would now open a website with a 20x20px button it would be less than 1mm large and impossible to hit. Therefore your device also has a pixel density of 3. This means that a 10x10px element on the website will use 30x30px of your screen.
So as a webdesigner you don’t have to worry about how high the resolution of the device is (at least for deciding how large to e.g. make a button), but only worry about how large it will apear on screen.
And thanks to the pixel density of 3 (other phones have 2 or 4), you can act as if the screen is as large as if you only use 640x360px of your destop computer. (1920/3=640)
And therefore Matomo records the viewport size instead of the size of the

Of course the pixel density is also important when you want to know how many of your users have high-resolution displays and if you maybe make all images/icons higher resolution.
That’s why this plugin (https://plugins.matomo.org/DevicePixelRatio) creates a new report that shows you the pixel density of all phones.

meisterleise · December 25, 2018, 5:32pm

Thanks again for your trouble. Meanwhile I understand it I think.
I’ve unstalled the plugin, but it gives global information only. So if I take a look at the visitors log I still don’t know, what was the real resolution of his device, right?

Lukas · May 1, 2020, 4:34pm

A post was split to a new topic: Screenresolution often unknown