Android deep links not following path prefix

Question

The closest I could find was this question here. but it doesnt quite cover the problem im having.

I have deep links in my app setup to use /app as the path prefix. The problem I'm having is that links like http://example.com/upgrade are also trying to open in my app even though it doesn't have /app anywhere in the url. I understand you cant exclude urls specified by the prefix, but isn't the whole point of path prefix to include only those urls?

basically I want links like these to deep link:

http://example.com/app/home
http://example.com/app/specials

but not links like these:

http://exaple.com/
http://example.com/login

and here is what I have in my manifest:

<data android:scheme="http"
    android:host="example.com"
    android:pathPrefix="/app"/>

Edit 1

also found this link but i dont have any empty prefixes, only ones with just a slash "/"

Edit 2

The url that was triggering it was http://example.com/upgrade.php?app=1&method=1&uid=1, I wasn't sure if app after the ? would also trigger it so I changed the prefix to /application but that also didn't work, its still triggering them.

Edit 3

here are the other deep link data tags in the manifest:

profile activity

<data android:scheme="myapp"
    android:host="profile"
    android:pathPrefix="/"/>

login/signup activity

<data android:scheme="myapp"
     android:host="login"
     android:pathPrefix="/signup"/>

main activity

<data android:scheme="myapp"
     android:host="main"
     android:pathPrefix="/"/>

<data android:scheme="http"
     android:host="test.example.com"
     android:pathPrefix="/app"/>

<data android:scheme="http"
     android:host="live.example.com"
     android:pathPrefix="/app"/>

Edit 4

This is getting more and more confusing, if I remove the data tag with myapp as the scheme from the activity (or if i remove the pathPrefix from everything with a prefix of "/") it no longer triggers the deep links from the web urls, even if they have /app in them.

Answer 1

I figured it out, It seems like the data tags sort of bleed into one another, so the prefix of "/" on the data with scheme "example" was also applying to all of the schemes in the other data tags. I just had to use separate Intent filters for my custom scheme deep links and the url deep links like so:

<activity android:name=".MainActivity">
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />

        <!-- must start with http://test.example.com/app -->
        <!-- http://test.example.com/ won't work since prefix / is in a different intent-filter -->
        <data android:scheme="http"
            android:host="test.example.com"
            android:pathPrefix="/app"/>

        <!-- must start with http://live.example.com/app -->
        <data android:scheme="http"
            android:host="live.example.com"
            android:pathPrefix="/app"/>

    </intent-filter>
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />

        <!-- must start with example://main/ -->
        <!-- http://test.example.com/ won't work since http is in a different intent-filter -->
        <data android:scheme="example"
            android:host="main"
            android:pathPrefix="/"/>

    </intent-filter>
</activity>

Answer 2

As explained here, your attributes get merged:

Although it's possible to include multiple <data> elements in the same filter, it's important that you create separate filters when your intention is to declare unique URLs (such as a specific combination of scheme and host), because multiple <data> elements in the same intent filter are actually merged together to account for all variations of their combined attributes.

Putting them into separate instances of <intent-filter> therefore fixes your problem.