Facebook’s F8 Agenda: Deep linking for mobile apps

mailto: is the same principle and has been around since the 90s.

@allantyoung there are a few ways Facebook can compile this data : (1) They could make calls to app url schemes that are publicly known (i.e. http://handleopenurl.com/) to check for a response (2) Facebook will become the largest data set of app url schemes as more apps register their url schema with Facebook when enabling deep-linking (3) Facebook bought Parse, and over 100,000 apps use Parse and many of those apps use FB connect, so Facebook knows which apps those users have

It is the reinvention of hyperlinking 'deep' into alternate views rather than just the native app's main page. I use it but the reason why it hasn't taken hold is largely because it isn't standardized across platforms.

Here's a routable handler that tries to standardize it: https://github.com/usepropeller/routable-android and https://github.com/usepropeller/routable-ios