Could this be due to the User-Agent string missing ‘Mobile’? Are there any Chrome flags to force mobile rendering?
Yeah, I’ve come across this before. Turns out, the issue is often with the User-Agent string missing the ‘Mobile’ token. A lot of sites depend on this to serve the mobile-friendly layout.
For me, it was a rogue extension and a custom debug flag that were altering the UA string even though the ‘Desktop site’ toggle was unchecked. So, I had to go into Chrome flags and reset everything to default (chrome://flags → Reset all to default), and that solved the rendering problem across multiple sites.
That’s definitely one route! I’ve run into something similar when I was testing a full-stack project and found that ‘localhost:3000’ was pointing to the local machine’s server on port 3000. So, in my case, the issue might not have been strictly related to Chrome’s user-agent but to how local environments handle requests.
However, I did see the same problem on Android, where the mobile layout wasn’t getting served, even though the ‘Desktop site’ toggle was unchecked. It turned out the ‘Mobile’ token wasn’t present in the User-Agent string, just like Rashmi mentioned. Resetting Chrome flags and making sure no extensions were interfering helped me sort it out.