Open your mobile app from a link

On the Team plan and above, a short link can open a screen in your mobile app. A visitor on an iPhone or an Android phone is offered the app; if it does not open, they continue to the link's destination. Everyone else goes to the destination as before.

Set it up

1. Open a link, or start a new one with More options.
2. Open Routing and find Open in app.
3. Fill in the app link for iOS, for Android, or both, and save.

• iOS app link: a link in your app's own scheme, such as myapp://product/42, or an https:// universal link your app handles.
• Android app link: a link your Android app handles, such as myapp://product/42. It cannot contain #.
• Android package name: the app's id on Google Play, such as com.example.app. It is required with an Android app link.

Your developers know these values: they are the links the app registers for. Addresses starting with http://, javascript:, tel: and a few others are not accepted.

What visitors see

A visitor on an iPhone, an iPad or an Android device gets a small page with two links, Open in the app and Continue to the website.

• With an app link in your app's own scheme, the page tries to open the app right away. If the app has not opened after a couple of seconds, the visitor is sent to the link's destination.
• With an https:// universal link on iOS, the page waits. The app opens when the visitor taps Open in the app, because iOS opens universal links only on a tap.
• On Android, Chrome opens the app when it is installed.

Visitors on a computer go straight to the destination. So do a phone without an app link for its system and an iPad showing the desktop version of sites, which identifies itself as a Mac. Search engines and the link previews in chat apps are sent to the destination too.

Browsers built into other apps, such as Instagram's, may refuse to open your app. The visitor can still tap Continue to the website, or wait to be sent there.

Sending people without the app to a store

The website a visitor continues to is the link's destination after its targeting rules. To send iPhones without the app to the App Store and Android phones to Google Play, add one rule for the operating system iOS and one for Android, each with the store address.

Good to know

• After someone installs the app from the store, it opens on its first screen. The link does not carry them to the screen it pointed at.
• The visit is counted as a click, as for any link. We cannot tell whether the app opened, so analytics do not show it.
• UTM tags and other parameters added to the short link are passed to the website destination. They are not added to the app link.
• Passwords, expiry dates, start dates, click limits and A/B rotation work as usual. They are applied before the app page is shown.
• A link cannot have both app links and retargeting pixels.
• It works on the shared short domain and on your own domains.
• If your plan changes to one without this feature, links that already have app links keep working, and you can still edit or remove them.

Developers can set the same values through the API: see iosAppLink, androidAppLink and androidPackage in the links reference.