Facebook and share buttons on a mobile-enabled website that open the mobile app instead of a browser window?

Question

One of the big flaws in Android webphones (and probably other Operating Systems for phones): You are surfing some website, and want to use the site's embedded share button for say Twitter. You want to use the embedded Twitter share because it pre-populates the tweet based on how the site designed it: namely, it has the title of the page and the link and maybe a relevant Twitter hashtag. If you were to use your mobile browser's share feature, you only get the link, and have to attempt to type in the title and guess relevant hashtags--not ideal. The same is the case with other social media shares, like facebook.

So, from the above, you understand why users would prefer to use a given website's own embedded share features, rather than that built into the mobile browser.

However, if a user clicks the site's embedded social media share button, it opens a new browser window for that social media. Ideally, this would not happen, as typical users do not log into these social tools using the mobile browser, and the resulting pop-up share is clunky to use on a small mobile screen. Instead, ideally, you would click on the site's embedded share button and it would attempt to open at least the official twitter (or whatever) app on your phone instead. This is ideal because users tend to use the apps to use their social media, and so would already be logged in. Moreover, such an app is obviously optimized for mobile use, and thus not as clunky.

And yet, this apparently does not exist... am I right?

That is, as a web designer, there is nothing I can do on my embedded Twitter and Facebook share buttons to prompt mobile phone users to use the official app to share (rather than through the mobile browser). Is that right?

Thanks, Derek

Answer 1

At least on my iPhone the twitter url-scheme does work.
the following opens the twitter app:

twitter://post?message=hello%20world

And facebook is fb://
Haven't tested it on android.
(via: http://wiki.akosma.com/IPhone_URL_Schemes )