A second answer here. The selection of front (facingMode:'user') and back (facingMode:'environment') cameras is an issue for something I'm working on.
It's possible to tell which camera you're using if you have an open .getUserMedia() stream to a camera. stream.getTracks[0].getCapabilities() gives back an object with either a facingMode:'user' or facingMode:'environment' field in it. But you already must have a stream open to the particular device to get this.
Here's what I have discovered using multiple devices in a mobile-device test farm. These are the order of the device entries yielded by .enumerateDevices().
tl;dr: On iOs devices, the front facing camera is the first videoinput device in the list, and the back-facing camera is the second one. On Android devices, the front facing camera or cameras have the string "front" in their device.label values and the back facing camra or cameras have the string "back".
iOS devices
- iOS devices running Mobile Safari: the
device.label items are all localized to the currently selected national language.
- The devices always appear in this order in the device array, with the front camera always appearing as the first device in the array with
device.kind:'videoinput'. Here is the list of devices labels I got from every iOS device I tried, auf Deutsch:
- audioinput:iPhone Mikrofon
- videoinput:Frontkamera
- videoinput:Rückkamera
- Some iPhones have multiple camera lenses on the back. Nevertheless, the MediaStream APIs in Mobile Safari only show one camera.
You can tell you’re on an iPhone when
navigator.userAgent.indexOf(' iPhone ') >= 0
You can tell you’re on an iPad when
typeof navigator.maxTouchPoints === 'number'
&& navigator.maxTouchPoints > 2
&& typeof navigator.vendor === 'string'
&& navigator.vendor.indexOf('Apple') >= 0
Notice that iPad Safari now lies and claims it's an Intel Mac. It presents this User-Agent string:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_6) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0.1 Safari/605.1.15
Android devices
Android devices: the `device.label' items are not localized.
The devices I looked at had different device.label lists. But the cameras I found all had either the string front or back in the device.label.
A Pixel 3A running Android 11 has this list of devices.
- audioinput:Standard
- audioinput:Speakerphone
- audioinput:Headset earpiece
- videoinput:camera2 1, facing front
- videoinput:camera2 0, facing back
- audiooutput:Standard
A Samsung SM-A205F running Android 9 has these devices in order.
- audioinput:Default
- audioinput:Speakerphone
- audioinput:Headset earpiece
- videoinput:camera2 1, facing front
- videoinput:camera2 2, facing front
- videoinput:camera2 0, facing back
- audiooutput:Default
This one enumerates two different front-facing selfiecams. The first one offers higher resolution than the second one.
A Samsung SM-G925I running Android 6.0.1
- audioinput:Default
- audioinput:Speakerphone
- audioinput:Headset earpiece
- videoinput:camera2 1, facing front
- videoinput:camera2 0, facing back
- audiooutput:Default
And, by the way, the results of .getSupportedConstraints() don't help much: both iOS and Android give facingMode:true.