Omnilinks, AppLinks and the State of Mobile Deeplinking

blog.urx.com

16 points·jmilinovich··7 comments

When I click an omnilink on my iPhone, and I don't have the relevant app installed, I am shown a dialogue box 'Safari cannot open the page because the address is invalid'. However, it goes away in less than a second (before I have time to react and click 'OK'), and I'm taken to the relevant web page.

I guess that's the intended behaviour.

yes, that is WOI. Unfortunately, web standards haven't allowed for complete pop-up suppression cross-platform and cross-browser. Fortunately, there are clever ways to make it suck less.

IMHO, the hard part in deep linking is connecting existing web app content w/ views inside the mobile app. But, not sure if that can be delivered as a SaaS/proxy service + SDK (since it is too specific to each site).

May be I am missing something. Isnt Omnilink just detecting the user agent (eg Google/Twitter crawler) and presenting the right content to the crawler? Is there something else to this solution?

yes, check out how the routing works: http://urx.com/getting-started

More interesting than a third-party deeplinking service (URX, AppLinks) would be a directory of deeplink schemes/uris so we could just use them as-is instead of proxying through some other guy

what would you be interested in doing with that data/index?

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