How to test user-agent details for a podcast app

Jan 28, 2026 · First published January 6 2025 · By James Cridland · 2 minutes to read

Got a podcast app? Want to check what its user agent details are?

OP3 is a free and open-source podcast prefix analytics service committed to open data and listener privacy.

OP3 gives a nice API with almost real-time logfile statistics. And here’s how to use it to see what user-agent this random new podcast app you’ve just discovered is using.

Using wifi - play any show that is measured by OP3. (Podnews Daily is one).
From the same device (or, at least, the same wifi connection) - visit this URL: https://op3.dev/api/1/hits?start=-1h&format=json&token=preview07ce&hashedIpAddress=current

Requests should appear within a few seconds.

OP3 doesn’t store IP addresses, but this call uses the same one-way hash to show you requests from your own IP address.

(Just a quick note: if using iPhone, you’ll want to remember not to be using Apple’s Private Relay to check the URL, otherwise it’ll look like a different IP address. Apple’s Private Relay isn’t used for podcast apps.)

An example

We thought we’d test the Pocket Casts desktop app, to see if it correctly adds Pocket Casts to the user-agent.

Below are the results: a HEAD and a GET call from the app, which marks itself as PocketCasts/2.0.8 in the userAgent, and also adds a referer. And you can see where we were at the time.

Get a proper token from OP3’s API if you’re going to do this in production, of course.

(If this isn’t another reason to join Podnews in supporting OP3 financially, we don’t know what is.)

{
    "rows": [
        {
            "time": "2025-01-06T23:26:10.212Z",
            "uuid": "3c68c38e43b54814a23a71e5534d7900",
            "hashedIpAddress": "cfb9f1a20014cc16f6c465436dbe37e1eac53449",
            "method": "HEAD",
            "url": "https://op3.dev/e,pg=9b024349-ccf0-5f69-a609-6b82873eab3c/podnews.net/audio/podnews241015.mp3",
            "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) PocketCasts/2.0.8 Chrome/126.0.6478.185 Electron/31.3.1 Safari/537.36",
            "referer": "https://play.pocketcasts.com/",
            "edgeColo": "BNE",
            "continent": "OC",
            "country": "AU",
            "timezone": "Australia/Brisbane",
            "regionCode": "QLD",
            "region": "Queensland"
        },
        {
            "time": "2025-01-06T23:26:10.238Z",
            "uuid": "63a7ae73b71f4bfdacf3f817487baa3e",
            "hashedIpAddress": "cfb9f1a20014cc16f6c465436dbe37e1eac53449",
            "method": "GET",
            "url": "https://op3.dev/e,pg=9b024349-ccf0-5f69-a609-6b82873eab3c/podnews.net/audio/podnews241015.mp3",
            "userAgent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) PocketCasts/2.0.8 Chrome/126.0.6478.185 Electron/31.3.1 Safari/537.36",
            "referer": "https://play.pocketcasts.com/",
            "range": "bytes=0-",
            "edgeColo": "BNE",
            "continent": "OC",
            "country": "AU",
            "timezone": "Australia/Brisbane",
            "regionCode": "QLD",
            "region": "Queensland"
        }
    ],
    "count": 2,
    "queryTime": 1163
}