The omnipresent threat of hacking and data breaches is a serious concern in this technologically connected world. As a business owner, your foremost concern would be to protect both your personal information and business.
In this regard, the term ‘mobile proxy’ has made a big name in the internet world. Many people are familiar with proxies, but mobile proxies are a new name on the horizon.
[Crawlbase has an excellent product available for businesses to cater to this issue. But we will get to that later on.]
If you are unaware of what a phone proxy is or how it works, continue this article. Why? Because it includes everything you need to know about mobile proxies.
Without further ado, let’s start:
What is a Mobile Proxy?
A mobile proxy is a intermediary server that assigns different cellular IP addresses to a user while masking their real IP address. A mobile proxy make it seem like the user is connected to the mobile data through 3G or 4G connection.
Reminder: A proxy is what shields your system’s direct connection and potentially sensitive information hidden from people who are not supposed to see it. It masks your cell phone IP address by collecting all your browsing requests and sending them through a second IP address instead of yours. The response is received through the same route while giving you complete online anonymity.
Please Note: Mobile proxies do not work with unused tablets or mobile phones.
Mobile proxies can run on devices other than mobile phones too. The working of mobile proxies is pretty simple: Mobile proxies operate by rotating IP addresses which are then passed through different 3G/4G connected cellular devices. The 4G mobile proxies make it challenging even to detect a masked cell phone IP address. Due to its extreme anonymity and mobile data architecture, they are mostly likely to be used by fraudsters or scammers.
Why Do You Need Mobile Proxies?
Mobile proxies forward your connection requests to a randomly rotating IP address in a proxy pool before reaching the target website. The main reason mobile proxies are used are to hide personal information and IP address from potential hackers online. Since mobile proxies allow anonymous internet browsing, they prevent third-party websites or hackers from monitoring the user’s online activity.
But that is not all.
A phone proxy offers a safer and faster internet connection. They use a fast cache storage system that allows you to disable direct download, improving the internet connection speed.
The most important reason behind using mobile proxies is that they identify scraping bots and deny them access to websites, which minimizes the web scraping practices.
Apart from that, mobile proxies are great for bypassing geo-restrictions and accessing content restricted in a region. Some companies have banned their applications from specific locations, but by using 4G mobile proxies, users can unblock these restrictions and view the content.
A mobile proxy is also great for managing multiple social media accounts. This is because IP bans can be avoided by providing a different IP address for every social media manager.
Lastly, mobile proxies are also effective in combatting ad frauds. While a mobile proxy server helps prevent IP blocking, it also masks the real identity of businesses using it. Hence ad fraudsters cannot check where the traffic is coming from, saving the user any hassle.
Mobile Proxy for Businesses - How Does it Work?
Companies often use web scraping to extract helpful information online to gain a competitive edge in the market. However, this research comes with multiple obstacles, such as getting blacklisted or facing limitations while accessing geographically restricted content. By coupling web scraping tools with mobile proxies, companies can overcome the barriers through different IPs and extract data from websites without restrictions.
Mobile proxies make the mining process much more accessible in this digital era, where data is gold. Understandably, the insights data brings for businesses are invaluable since it contributes to decision-making.
However, the data collection process can take a long time manually. This is why companies opt for web scraping tools. But again, web scraping alone can be challenging as some competitors don’t allow rivals to access their data. When you use a mobile proxy, this IP address is masked and can access all necessary data.
How is a Mobile Proxy Different From Other Proxies?
Different types of proxies are available; public, dedicated, private, transparent, Residential etc. But most of them work by either using other servers or PCs. Mobile proxies, however, have their own mobile proxy server, which is where they use the IP addresses provided to them via mobile service owners. Since the proxy providers constantly change the IP addresses to be given, users can take advantage of millions of them.
Mobile proxies differ from other proxies because they assign dynamic IPs to the users that are updated every 02 minutes and hence, are impossible to detect. 4G mobile proxies also use NAT technology to deliver the same IP to an array of users. This is why it is hard to detect, and no website can determine whether it is a bot or a person trying to access their data.
Mobile Proxies Vs. Crawlbase’s Smart Proxy
Unlike regular mobile proxies, the Smart Proxy avoids blocked requests and bans more effectively. This is because it uses a combination of artificial intelligence and machine learning to avoid CAPTCHAs and blocks. Smart Proxy also allows you to use a single node to connect to a proxy network countless times.
Smart Proxy comes with more than 1,000,000 unique proxies around the world. With its automatic IP rotation, instantly expand your web crawler’s capabilities and make millions of daily requests.
The most significant benefit of using a proxy is staying anonymous and making significantly more requests without getting banned when accessing websites than if you were using a single proxy.
How to Configure Proxy Settings in Chrome Mobile?
Usually, when setting up a proxy, you need to configure it on your system first. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how you can configure mobile proxy settings in a chrome mobile:
- Open your cellular device, go to Settings, and tap Wi-Fi.
- Long-press the network name which you are currently connected with.
- When the next screen opens, tap on Modify Network.
- Go to Advanced Options > Proxy Menu and select the Manual option.
- Enter localhost as your device’s Proxy hostname and port number for the proxy port.
- Click on Save and Continue.
How to Set up Smart Proxy on Mobile?
Smart Proxy API is designed to work on top of your web crawler. It sends HTTP requests and receives responses through the command line, so you have to use ‘cURL’ for this API.
Here’s how you can set up Smart Proxy on mobile:
- Go to https://crawlbase.com/dashboard/ and sign up.
- Send request to the proxy server by entering the following command:
curl -x "http://[email protected]:8012" -k "http://httpbin.org/ip"
- All mobile proxy calls will go to
http://smartproxy.crawlbase.comand port 8012 using your access token as a proxy username.
Here’s how the backend works:
When you send a request to the proxy, the proxy will authorize your request using your proxy authorization username, your private access token below. It will then redirect your request to the Crawling API and then return the response to your application.
Final Verdict: Mobile Proxies for the Win
According to Data Reportal, over 5.31 billion people worldwide use mobile internet - and the trend is increasing steadily…and why wouldn’t that be the case? We rely on cellular devices to perform pretty much every possible task.
In this highly competitive market, you need web crawlers to stay updated on competitors’ assets and pricing in the market. This data is best collected when your web crawler is coupled with a mobile proxy to elevate the entire experience.
You need a mobile proxy, in particular, because there is a very low possibility of us returning to laptops and computers as the primary sources for internet usage. The reason is the portability and ease of handling that cellular devices bring.
Crawlbase Proxy is an excellent option in this regard because not only does its unlimited bandwidth and custom geolocalization, it is built on top of AI, which allows faster and more accurate results.
So what are you waiting for? Sign up for it today!
