Especially since the nascent mobile advertising market focused so heavily on the gaming industry, it makes sense that people weren't terribly motivated to start indexing deep app content early on.
We (at URX) feel especially passionate about non-game apps that we use on a daily basis, and get excited about the ability to help them grow faster and reach their users in more relevant ways. Personally I'd prefer to see ads from apps that I already trust, rather than ads trying to get me to install more games that don't add a lot of value for me as a non-gamer.
I'm interested to hear what about Facebook's approach [1] is so strict. It's a little funky that they make you register an ugly custom protocol scheme... in their words, "the deep link scheme would be your app id prefixed by "fb". e.g 'fb1234567://'". I'm also somewhat surprised that they limit you to a very specific set of call-to-action phrases: - Open Link - Shop Now - Use App - Book Now - Play Game - Listen Now - Watch Video ... "Use App" is a little boring, isn't it?
Would you have done anything differently than facebook?
I really think twitter is on the right track with Twitter Cards [2]; it seems that once we're able to better understand the content within apps (or pair it up with the web equivalents), we can construct a much richer data set and make awesome new experiences possible in the ways people use their apps.
[1] https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ads-for-apps/mobile-app...
[2] https://dev.twitter.com/docs/cards/app-installs-and-deep-lin...