I saw something today that had me go take a look back in the logs, I was searching for this in the user-agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/

That's it. That exact string, ending with "Chrome/". I did not include the chrome version in my search.

I see maybe a dozen instances or sessions (about 140 individual page requests) where someone (or some thing) was using that as the UA. First was in June 2023. Only about 3 or 4 times this year, the most recent being today.

The example with the lowest chrome version number (which happened in 2024) was this:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 11_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.9279.1304 Mobile Safari/537.36

All of these had Chrome version starting with 39.x or 40.x, 41.x, etc, to the highest being 59.x. Thing is, the very highest is Chrome/59.0.6302.1512 which also happened to be in June 2023 (!). The progression of the version number does not coincide or increase over time. It's all random. Today's example was 51.x.

I don't own an iPhone, the one guy I know that has one says he doesn't have Chrome installed on it, so I can't ask him what is the latest version.

Is having Chrome installed (and be the default browser) on an iPhone common? Would it be expected that the iPhone chrome version would be such a low number like these? And that chrome doesn't auto-update to the latest version?

Or am I looking at a UA that is not a legit iPhone UA - some sort of spoofing going on?