most analytics tools know your visitors' phones better than you do.
their model numbers. their os versions. their browser builds. all from a string the browser sends on every request.
i didn't want that string. so cloudline doesn't store it.
i'm om yaduvanshi, 18, an applied ai developer building cloudline, a cookieless google analytics alternative. one script tag, under 2 KB, no cookies, no stored ips. this is day 10 of my 90-day build in public, and part of my series on tracking the web without tracking people. so far: referrers, scroll depth, funnels, button clicks, engaged time, live visitors, traffic sources.
what the user agent gives you for free
every request your browser makes carries a user-agent string. it names the browser, the os, sometimes the exact device. every analytics tool that reads it gets device breakdowns for zero effort.
the catch is that it's a fingerprint ingredient. combine it with a few other signals and you can single out one visitor out of thousands. that's exactly the machinery cookieless analytics is trying to avoid. so i banned it. cloudline stores no user-agent strings. not even a trimmed version.
what i kept instead
a pageview in cloudline stores four things: page, referrer, screen size, time. screen size is the one that does double duty here.
the dashboard turns screen width into a device bucket. narrow width reads as mobile, medium as tablet, wide as desktop. the cutoffs are boring on purpose. they match what most responsive sites already use as breakpoints.
what you lose
honesty first: this is approximate. a phone in landscape can read as a tablet. a tiny laptop can read as one too. a desktop with a half-width browser window looks like a phone.
here's what i tell myself about it: the question "mobile or desktop" is almost never about the exact device. it's about how your site looks. a phone in landscape still shows your site in a narrow window, which is what you were designing for anyway.
so the bucket answers the useful question even when it misses the literal one.
the honest limit
if you need to know that 34% of visitors are on iphone 15s running ios 18, this isn't your tool. and if that's a real requirement, i'd genuinely ask what decision changes on that answer. most of the time the answer is "redesign the mobile checkout" and the bucket already told you that.
there's a pattern across this whole series. every time i remove a signal, the remaining ones have to earn their place. screen size earns it. it was already in the pageview for layout purposes, and it carries the device question for free.
one line, under a minute
if you haven't installed yet:
<script src="https://trycloudline.space/tracker.js" data-site-id="YOUR-SITE-ID"></script>
takes under a minute. removing it is deleting the line.
cloudline is free for early users while i keep building it. cookieless analytics in one line of code.
— om yaduvanshi
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