Cookie Support

I've been aware of problems with cookies for several years now, but I didn't really have good numbers. Well the folks over at mippin give us a bit more detail into the problems:

Our analysis of three of the most popular markets showed the following ratio of devices not supporting cookies:

South Africa - 4% unsupported

UK - 6%

and

US - 43%

6% is bad enough, but what's with the US? They go on to say that the problem is with the UP 6.2.3 browser (that's Openwave to those of you following along at home):

The problem handsets successfully store the cookie with a domain name they understand i.e. .(dot)mippin.com, but when they return to mippin they cannot match the domain .mippin.com to our site mippin.com and don't send us the cookie.

So yet another browser gotcha. Oh, and one of the requirements for dotMobi is to not use a subdomain, so if you follow that rule then you'll run into problems with Openwave.

I regularly have problems with cookies on my older phone. Certain applications become completely unusable when you have to sign in for every request. We normally recommend URL variables whenever feasible, rather than cookies.