Utility of HTTP header "Content-Type: application/force-download" for mobile?

Content-Type: application/force-download means "I, the web server, am going to lie to you (the browser) about what this file is so that you will not treat it as a PDF/Word Document/MP3/whatever and prompt the user to save the mysterious file to disk instead". It is a dirty hack that breaks horribly when the client doesn't do "save to disk".

Use the correct mime type for whatever media you are using (e.g. audio/mpeg for mp3).

Use the Content-Disposition: attachment; etc etc header if you want to encourage the client to download it instead of following the default behaviour.


To download a file please use the following code ... Store the File name with location in $file variable. It supports all mime type

$file = "location of file to download"
header('Content-Description: File Transfer');
header('Content-Type: application/octet-stream');
header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename='.basename($file));
header('Content-Transfer-Encoding: binary');
header('Expires: 0');
header('Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0');
header('Pragma: public');
header('Content-Length: ' . filesize($file));
ob_clean();
flush();
readfile($file);

To know about Mime types please refer to this link: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mime-content-type.php


application/force-download is not a standard MIME type. It's a hack supported by some browsers, added fairly recently.

Your question doesn't really make any sense. It's like asking why Internet Explorer 4 doesn't support the latest CSS 3 functionality.