By default SharePoint 2013 detects if the site is being displayed in a mobile device and shows the content in a very simplified portal that remove most of the features. Sometimes you just want more control over your mobile website.

Deactivating this view can be useful if you want to get the full site to be displayed on mobile devices, or if you have a custom responsive theme.

In this article I’ll show 3 different methods to change this behavior, and display the full website when in mobile devices.

Option #1 - Deactivate SharePoint Mobile feature

This is ideal if you are using Office 365 or if you don't have access to the SharePoint server. If you don't want to remove the mobile view from all sites this is the process you should follow.

SharePoint Mobile View
  1. Open your site and go to Site Settings -> Manage site features
  2. Locate Mobile Browser View and click Deactivate
  3. Deactivate Mobile View

  4. Refresh your browser on your mobile device and you should see your entire SharePoint site
SharePoint

Option #2 - Change the redirect behavior of a mobile browser

This process is just available for the SharePoint 2013 on-premises, and you need to have access to the server where it is installed, you should follow this method if you want to remove the mobile view from all sites.

  1. On your server click Start, click Administrative Tools, and then Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager
  2. Right-click the IIS website where the SharePoint web application is installed, and then click Explore
  3. IIS Explorer

  4. In Windows Explorer, double-click the App_Browsers folder
  5. Open the compat.browser file in a text editor
  6. Find the node that corresponds to the mobile browser or device that you want to modify
  7. Find the element
  8. Set the value attribute to false to display a standard view of the site in the mobile browser
  9. Save your changes to the compat.browser file
  10. Restart IIS by entering the following command at the command prompt
    iisreset /noforce
  11. After the restart open your SharePoint site in your mobile device
  12. Responsive SharePoint site

Option #3 - Create a device chanel

This method is only available for SharePoint publishing sites, it will work on Collaboration sites also but you need to activate first the Publishing features. Since it's only available for publishing it will not work on SharePoint Foundation.

A device channel is a feature that enables you to render specific site content while maintaining the same URL across a pool of different devices, with it you can have different layouts for the same URL and SharePoint will manage them based on the user agent of the browser.

Device Chanels

To Create a new device channel do the following:

  1. On your SharePoint site go to the site settings
  2. Open Device Channels, it is located under Look and Feel
  3. Add a new item to the list. When you create a device channel item, there are five required and optional fields to supply for the process the table below lists these fields and describes what type of information must be provided.

  4. Field Required Value Value
    Name Yes This is the name of your design channel. It can be a friendly name to identify the channel
    Alias Yes The alias name enables you to identify your device channel in code, device channel panels (discussed later in this article), previews, and other contexts
    Description No A field for supplying a general description for the device channel
    Device inclusion rules Yes A field for supplying the user agent substring such as Windows Phone OS. Device redirection to a specific master page depends on what is entered for this value. For more information about what values to supply in this field, see the table with the User agent substrings.
    Active No Selecting this check box activates your device channel.

     

    Device User Agent Substring
    Windows Phone 7.5 Windows Phone OS 7.5
    Windows Phone Windows Phone OS
    iPhone iPhone
    iPad iPad
    Any Mobile Device $FallbackMobileUserAgents;
    Default Default
  5. For all mobile devices fill the Device inclusion rules with:
    $FallbackMobileUserAgents;
  6. Add New Device Chanel

  7. Go to the site Settings and open Mater Pages, it is located under Look and Feel
  8. Set your desired master page to show on mobile devices
  9. Mobile Devices