Amidst talks of mobile proxies being obsolete
Whats up y'all. I will probably be at the end of the board here, or against everyone's opinion but here goes. Why mobile proxies might be worth the extra cost:
I've been using mobile proxies for about 3 or so years now and wanted to share some thoughts since I noticed a trend as of lately whether "mobile proxies are not worth, residentials will replace them etc". The short answer would be, it depends on the situation. Sometimes yes, sometimes absolutely not. Mobile IPs are different when you're dealing with platforms that are paranoid about bots. Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, WhatsApp, whatever, you name it. These apps were built for phones, so when you come at them with a residential IP from a desktop user agent, you're already looking suspicious.
I was burning through residential proxies trying to manage multiple social accounts until I switched to mobile. The difference was night and day. Bans dropped significantly because the traffic pattern actually makes sense - mobile IP + mobile device fingerprint = platform is happy. Mind you I was not so adamant in the knowledge of fingerprinting, this came up way later, although I should have researched it first thing before jumping on the proxies. Also, mobile IPs get shared among tons of real users on the same carrier, so even if one gets flagged, it's usually temporary. Carriers use CGNAT, meaning hundreds of people might share the same IP. Platforms can't just blacklist an entire carrier's IP range.
Why I think that scraping with mobile proxies is a waste of money: If you're just scraping public data from sites that don't have aggressive bot detection, you're wasting money. A decent residential proxy or datacenter proxies will do fine for most web scraping tasks. (I converted to this a while back, combining both resis and dc to scrape the websites, did not let me down.
My current setup: I use mobile proxies for managing social media related stuff and fall back to residential for everything else. Saves money this way. As for scraping, residential proxies and datacenter proxies combined. Yes, I am aware that there are plenty of already one-place solutions such as web scraper api, web unblocker, headless browser or whatever, my setup works for me and I'm running it until it no longer works or becomes obsolete (as some of you already pitching this for mobile proxies lol)