MobileSafari/602.1 CFNetwork/808.3 Is this an old thing or a new one?

Don't know about the actual build number, but the UA is common. This is the icon getter for Safari. It will always request these apple icon files as well as favicons.ico.

It's used all the time, but especially if someone wants to save a link to your site in bookmarks or on the home screen on their phone. Looks better to have an icon for the link, so many of us create these custom icons and make them available in the base directory.

Also, normmal behavior for Safari to request apple touch icons many times, especially if it doesn't find them it can be very persistent.

Here's a resource with instructions on how to create these icons: [blog.karlribas.com...]

@keyplr Thanks. I would have never thought that this would be useful to the Apple people. I guess I should unban and do up a graphic for them. Thanks for the explanation and the link.

BTW - if you host the icon in your site's base level directory you really don't need any code in the page's HEAD pointing to it since CFNetwork will look for it there by default.