yfriedman@ can you help triage this? (I saw that you are assigned to a user agent string issue, couldn't find the right components if any...)

So there's a bunch of different issues here that would need to be considered:

1) Currently the WebView and Chrome useragents are the same overall format, with just an additional "; wv" token to differentiate WebView (and a mysterious "Version/4.0" token that's there because the old webview had it). We would like to keep it this way, because it's the same codebase and it makes sense if they are handled the same - but WebView's useragent format is rigidly enforced by Android CTS/CDD and can't easily be changed in arbitrary ways. WebView could not include the architecture information at present as a result, which makes it less ideal to include it for Chrome. :/

2) There's ongoing investigation into removing some of the identifying information from the current useragent for privacy reasons; tnagel@ may have an opinion on whether adding the architecture here would be going against that or not. One of the main things being removed is the build ID, so you should not count on being able to use the build ID to infer what architecture the device uses..

3) It's a *bad* idea to make decisions about what APK to send people to install based on what the browser's user agent is. On most current android devices both 32-bit and 64-bit apps are supported and browsers may be running with either architecture - that doesn't imply anything useful about which architecture of native app you should use. For example, Chrome is currently 32-bit on all devices, even high spec devices for which 64-bit APKs are generally preferred.

4) We don't currently have a finalised plan for what we're going to do with Chrome in general regarding the Android changes you refer to, so this may be a little premature :)

Marking as available and unassigning. No active work streams for this and as torne@ indicates, it's not clear this is actually desirable.