The Second Coming of Deep Linking | Hacker News Reader

The Second Coming of Deep Linking

techcrunch.com

35 pointsdmitrig0114 comments

You know, an article about deep linking might be more meaningful if they took their own advice and deep linked to what "deep linking" is (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_deep_linking). This IS a hypertext medium you know.

I was expecting an explanation of what deep linking is, the way the article is written it lacks context: if you don't know what is "deep linking", it doesn't make much sense.

OK, closes tab.

Do people really clutter their phone with every random website app? Most of them appear to be marginally better at rendering the website for the low, low price of scraping some subset of your personal data.

I use Android profiles for the simple reason that I don't agree some random app needs to know every email or phone number in my address book,much less mine my text history. The few apps I use go to a profile hooked to my ham email address. Still not perfect.

But deep linking via apps? What's the compelling use case again? I don't see one that doesn't work just as well on the mobile web site.

> What's the compelling use case again?

From the article:

"The mobile website banner links to content within the app. A user clicks the download button, installs the app and, after install, is deep linked to the same content in the app."

So the usecase is: when you want to see the exact same thing in an app as you can on a mobile website.

The primary value add is that it lets you bypass the nag popup imploring you to install the app.

Incidentally, that's usually also the primary value add to installing the app.

Imagine it's an Instagram link in a tweet or something like that.

My only reference to deep links are the deep web links. The modern concept of mobile deep links throws me of the ball every time.

Me too - Why are they redefining an already established term?!?

It isn't a redefinition. IRIs (or URIs if you prefer) have always encompassed the ability to be things other than http: and https:, and the application has the ability to assign arbitrary meanings to what follows the colon. You just don't see it very often on the web.

I meant the concept of deep linking, which used to mean that you refer to a specific link on a subpage of a site (Such as a particular article), rather than the domain. There's a connotation of legalese to it - The word is/was used as a negatively loaded term by those who think they have a right to control who links to their site/content and how they do so. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_linking

Holy keyword stuffing.

Except that iOS deep linking isn't natively supported, you have to do it through DeviceFingerpting and even if it was setup correctly you'd have to go through a lot of effort to do it.

There are companies that do the legwork for you.

I don't understand why this is still an issue. Didn't Android fix this problem? Can't iOS adopt a similar system?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com