The Microsoft team recently released the SharePoint mobile app for iOS: https://blogs.office.com/2016/06/21/your-intranet-in-your-pocket-the-sharepoint-mobile-app-for-ios-is-now-available/
While the app in itself is pretty neat, it comes with it’s own limitations just like any other mobile app. The same holds true for the view of SharePoint sites that you see in a mobile browser. This is especially true if you have followed the principles for a responsive UI while building your site. So the question on how to turn off the mobile view has come up quite a few times during my SharePoint consulting engagements. Hence this quick post:

The easiest way to turn off the mobile view in your SharePoint 2013 or Share Point 2016 or Office 365 – SharePoint Online site is to deactivate the “Mobile Browser View” feature for the site:

For those who are new to SharePoint, you can do this as follows:

1. Click the gear icon on the top right corner of you site
2. Click “Site settings”
3. Click “Manage site features” under the “Site Actions” heading on the page
4. Click the “Deactivate” button  for the “Mobile Browser View” feature

One thing to keep in mind is that this is a site level feature. So turning it off for the site in question will not turn it off for the sub-sites or any other sites in your environment.

Besides the above method that I recommend, their are other ways of accomplishing this such as the following:

1. Use PowerShell to turn it off on all existing sites (Limitation: Only works on existing sites)
2. Use Devise Channels (Limitation: Only works in publishing sites)
3. Disable the default mobile redirect behavior in the App_Browsers\compat.browser file for the IIS Website for your SharePoint web application (Limitation: Only works on-prem – not in SharePoint Online)

I hope the above is useful for someone. Time to get back to speaker selections for SharePoint Saturday Pittsburgh 🙂