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Why Does Mobile visibility features not work when viewing Gmail in a browser vs the Gmail app?

  • 2 November 2021
  • 3 replies
  • 765 views
Z
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If you open the Safari (or Chrome) app on your iPhone and visit mail.google.com to view a Klaviyo email, every block shows — even if the visibility is set to only show on “Desktop”. 

This problem occurs on the classic editor and the new editor.

 

Below is a screenshot from the iPhone’s Safari app.

As you can see, both blocks are visible, regardless of visibility setting.

 

iPhone > Safari > Gmail Web Interface (mail.google.com)

Here are some screenshots from inside the classic editor:

As you can see above, the Block Styles are set to Show On Mobile only.
And here, the Block Styles are set to Show On Desktop only.
Here you can see the desired block visibility as I switch between Desktop and Mobile preview.
 

Like I said before, this problem occurs on the classic editor as well as the new editor.

I can’t find any documentation about this situation anywhere.

Any help would be much appreciated.

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Best answer by Taylor Tarpley 7 November 2021, 15:26

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Taylor Tarpley
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Hi @Zach H, 

 

Thanks for sharing your question with the Community and for providing these screenshots of this issue! 

 

This issue here lies with the way you’re viewing your email. Unfortunately, the browser version of Gmail is typically unable to respect media queries. This is why you see both boxes on the screen, instead of the ‘mobile only’ box. While this is expected  behavior of browser versions that don’t respect these queries, however, there is nothing Klaviyo can do to change this. If, for instance, you were to view the email in the Gmail app, you would not run into this issue. 

 

A potential workaround for this would be to only use blocks that display on both mobile and desktop. Additionally, you can also utilize testing services like litmus.com and emailonacid.com to test your emails and see how they will appear on different platforms.

 

Thanks for sharing your question in the Community! 

-Taylor 

Z
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Thanks for the reply.

I thoroughly battle tested my email designs across dozens of clients in Litmus and everything looked great. I can’t even find a way to test this particular scenario in Litmus. I don’t think it exists.

Which makes me think it may be an edge case that I shouldn’t worry about. Do you know if there any way to know for sure how many of my users view email this way?

In Klaviyo, I ran a custom “Single Metric Deep Dive Report” on Email Opens by Email Client. I’m including a screenshot of the results below. Do you know which, if any, of the client names below would include this particular case? As you can see, “Mobile Safari” is a huge group. Is “Mobile Safari” Apple’s native iPhone “Mail” app? Or are these users actually viewing emails in the mobile Safari browser app?

 

 

 

Thanks for your help.

Taylor Tarpley
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Userlevel 7
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Hi @Zach H, 

 

Glad to hear you are already using these helpful tools. They will only keep being an asset to your business in the future. Thanks for the additional information and screenshot, helps us know better what we’re dealing with here! To figure out these issue, running a custom report on Email Clients by Email Opens is the next step we recommend to figure out who this affects in your account and gives you an idea who are the most popular email clients your customers use. 

 

Yes the clients you’d want to pay attention to for this issue would be Apple Mail and Mobile Safari. However, there isn’t a direct answer to know exactly who is viewing your emails like this because Apple Mail is technically included in Mobile Safari and the new Apple update has thrown a wrench in trusting these Email Open numbers in general. Due to the recent Apple iOS 15 update, there are many reasons why this number might actually be inflated and not reflect real numbers. Klaviyo has put out an informative blog on the Apple Update detailing what we’re doing in response and how this might affect your account until you know more. In essence, Apple is inflating these open rates and the numbers you see in your account might not be totally accurate. 

 

‘Client Name usually resolves as Mobile Safari regardless of the client used to perform a given Opened Email event on iOS devices.

As a result, including Mobile Safari will capture all recipients impacted by Mail Privacy Protection, as well as a subset of recipients who are not impacted. In this respect, combining Apple Mail and Mobile Safari to assess the potential impact of iOS 15 is likely to over-estimate this share of users to some degree.’

 

If you want to see exactly who on your list is using Apple Mail, create a segment using Opened Email where Client Name = Apple Mail OR Mobile Safari* AND where the recipient is not suppressed. 

 

However, like I mentioned earlier, to ensure that your templates are reading successfully, I would only use blocks optimized for both mobile and desktop version. As using separate blocks is what originally caused this issue. 

 

Hope this helps! 

-Taylor 

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