Universal links (Deep linking) not working on iPhone but works on iPad

Question

I am trying to build deep linking feature into my app. I did all the necessary set up for deep linking to work like, enabling associated domains in my app, adding apple-app-site-association to the root directory of my server, and I am serving a valid apple-app-site-association over https, I also validated my apple-app-site-association using this tool Validate your apple-app-site-association.

After doing everything right, I tested the deep linking feature on my iPad and it worked as expected. But when I tried to do the same on my iPhone it doesn't work, it always took me to safari. I tried it on 6s device, I reinstalled the app, I cleared Safari website data & cleared the history. Also updated the iPhone & iPad to iOS 9.3.5. The updating the OS didn't change a thing.

iPad still continue to work with deeplink URLs just like it did while it was on 9.3.4. iPhone still opened the link in safari.

Please give me some pointers on how to workaround this issue, I think this might be an apple bug but again I don't understand how it can work on iPad which is running same software as iPhone. Any help or guidelines is much appreciated.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I was able to fix this issue and this is one of the annoying issue that I have come across, because it doesn't say what is going wrong.

Fix: Whenever the iOS opens your link in safari, you need to pull down the webpage in safari and there you'll see a banner saying that, open it in the app. Once you click on that banner your future links will start opening the app instead of opening it in the safari browser.

There was no error whatsoever and there was no indication why the link was getting opened I am pretty sure that, iOS didn't download the apple-app-site-association whenever I installed the app.

Also note that the banner in the webpage will not be visible whenever your link opens up in safari, you need to pull down the webpage and then the banner will become visible and if you click on open in app banner, it will start opening the links in app.

If in future if you select to view the link in safari by clicking on context menu which appears on right hand side of the status bar, which will be saying "Open in [your app name]" in safari, the links in future will open in safari instead of app, and again if the banner open in app isn't visible, you have to pull down the webpage to see that banner.

HTH.