Opening deep content links in native apps from mobile web

Question

My company has an app (iOS and Android), to which the following scenarios applies. I'm trying to help point my engineers and product team in the right direction.

When one of our users clicks on a content link from one of our emails, or Tweets or Facebook posts, and they're on their mobile device, we prompt the user with a link to download our app. This is similar to what many apps do, including LinkedIn (see i.stack.imgur.com/glSgJ.png).

I imagine this is mildly effective of driving awareness and downloads of a native app, for new users who came in from social media and various web sources. However, it is not helpful at all for a user like me who already has the app!
1) clicking "No Thanks" keeps me on the mobile web (when I want to be in the native app), and 2) clicking "Download the App" takes me to iTunes App Store page for an app I already own.

SUPER ANNOYING. As a result, I have to manually open the app, and search for the content in question. I'm guessing most users don't do this. More importantly, depending on the UI/UX of the app, I may never get there!

Again, I know we are handling mobile web visits in the same way many other companies (including LinkedIn) do, but it seems we are leaving a lot of potential native app use on the table. I want our engineers to build that elusive 3rd option, "Open In App".

Spotify and Rdio have solved this very nicely. Here are deep content links (in the case of these companies, to a specific song) for the two apps respectively:

• http://open.spotify.com/track/2SldBUTJSK6xz43i8DZ5r2
• http://rd.io/x/QF3NK0JKWmk

If you have a moment, first grab the free version of Rdio or Spotify apps. Then, if you open those links above from an iOS device, you will see how nice the experience is, for existing native app users: Rdio has a nice "Tap to open in Rdio" link (http://i.stack.imgur.com/B7PuE.png), and Spotify's link is even more clear, "I have Spotify" (http://i.stack.imgur.com/Q3IV6.png). Both apps also include a link to download the app, for new app users. More importantly, both apps cookie the user: future visits to links (whether from email, Twitter, Facebook, etc) on mobile web automatically open the app, instead of prompting you to choose each time. SUPER CONVENIENT.

Questions:

1) How do they accomplish this? I'm initially only concerned about iOS (on which I tested this), but this same situation should apply to Android.

2) Why aren't more apps doing this? It doesn't seem like rocket science, so am I missing a key reason why this might be a bad idea? Half of my problem is convincing the use case.

3) Why don't I see discussions about this technique? I've searched a ton for an iOS solution. I come up with a lot of discussion about URL registrations (mainly app-to-app), but no one actually referring to the type of scenario I describe (mobile web prompt to open native app).

It seems that with minimal engineering, app developers could dramatically increase native app use, converting from mobile web. :)

Answer 1

Android supports deep linking. Please refer to http://developer.android.com/training/app-indexing/deep-linking.html