URX (YC S13) Is A Brilliant Mobile Ad Service That Deeplinks Into Ecommerce Apps | Hacker News Reader

URX (YC S13) Is A Brilliant Mobile Ad Service That Deeplinks Into Ecommerce Apps

techcrunch.com

56 pointsjmilinovich20 comments

I see a bunch of comments on how useful this is, but I just uninstall applications that have ads that are intrusive. I'd love to get back to the point where I could buy software and pay the developers to make a living. Apparently everyone thinks they need to be Google now (ad supported).

Advertisers are willing to pay more than users.

Perhaps ... or maybe most applications aren't worth real money to consumers? I'm not trolling and as a professional software (and hardware) developer, I'm concerned that the perception free applications give users is that they have no monetary value. This is dangerous.

Yes ... I use and contribute to open-source projects, primarily libraries, frameworks and developer tools. Does this make me a hypocrite?

How would this work if the user didn't already have the app it's deeplinking to? Like if an ad in Pandora took me to a page in Hotel Tonight but I didn't have Hotel Tonight installed, then what?

Also, seems like a feature that could be added to one of the more popular in-app ad services without too much effort.

URX's ads are only shown to users who already have a given app installed. If a user uninstalls an app and sees a deeplink ad before our systems refresh, they will be directed to the app store on click.

Sounds very interesting, couple of questions:

1) Have you thought about falling back to the advertiser's website if the app isn't installed?

2) Will the link scheme be made available and if so will it be possible to link to apps from within web pages?

1- Definitely. this is something we can easily accommodate, depending on the advertiser's preferences (ex: mobile only vs. mobile second companies)

2- We've built our own link creator (see footer link on site) to make it easy to learn about other apps' url schemes and create links into their apps. these links can be used from anywhere, including the web. We're adding apps consistently, so let us know if there are any that aren't already there.

Looking around the web site, it's a little hard to figure out what their Android story is. On the one hand, their developer info is about only their iOS library, and explicit references to Android elsewhere are ... not prominent. On the other hand, on Android, apps have been able to "claim" URLs for a while now. (The Twitter, YouTube, and Google Maps apps routinely offer to display URLs on the corresponding web sites, if they're present.)

Deeplinking has been supported on Android since the beginning via Android Intents. Our ads work for both Android and iOS, and we are currently finishing our Android Turnpike library.

so URX is mainly solving the iOS deficiency of not having a deep-linking structure similar to Android Intents, isn't it?

This is pretty smart, especially with location-specific apps like HotelTonight. I'm assuming an ad-serving app could pass along my location and then display an ad for a hotel room in that city.

It's stuff like this that Groupon should be doing/looking at if they want to become relevant again.

Living Social agrees with you

I see why this is super useful, but won't this functionality make more sense at the iOS level, as part of their standard API and with full support in the XCode environment? All apps should be able to deep dive into other apps, with certain rules attached.

Well, providing the app wants to support it, there already is a mechanism using url schemes. I'm assuming turnpike uses these?

yes, that is correct.

completely agree- until then, URX's Turnpike Open Source library will have to do!

It sounds like it would depend a lot of 3rd party tracking cookies. But how's that work with Safari in iOS defaulting 3rd party cookies to off?

Apps don't use cookies but rather Apple IDFA and Android ID. This is one of the biggest differences between the app world and the web world.

Are there any sites which list the deep-linking schemas for popular apps? Or where app developers can share their schema for others to use?

We've built a free link generator (http://www.urx.com/about/urx_links) that helps expose schemas for apps that we know about. Please contact us (team@) with any that we're missing.

http://schemes.zwapp.com/ also has a ton of schemas, but is a bit unorganized and not completely reliable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com