URX Raises $12 Million, Sets Sights on Links Inside Apps | Hacker News Reader

URX Raises $12 Million, Sets Sights on Links Inside Apps

blogs.wsj.com

13 pointsjmilinovich9 comments

>Also on Monday, the company released a new technology it calls OmniLinks, a special type of “smart” web link designed to help developers direct users to either a mobile app or a traditional Web page, depending on the device they’re using.

What happens if someone is using a phone but wants a real site rather than having to install permission-happy bloatware as so many sites' apps are?

I think they've built some tech that attempts to open a deep link into the native app, but if that fails (for example, if you don't have the app installed) it falls back to opening the site in your browser.

@mikejarema, this is basically what we are doing; if a user doesn't like an app, then they won't have it installed, and it will simply fallback to the website URL in the browser.

[full disclosure, I'm an engineer at URX]

How can URX lock in customers?

It seems like their deep linking method could be replicated easily (i.e. someone could build a site which generates deep links on demand, in the same way as URX does, even using the existing designed-for-URX tags in the HTML of the source page).

Is omnilink just part of their strategy?

@rahimnathwani, just to clarify one point:

There are absolutely no "designed-for-URX tags" that we have documented. All of the meta/link tags that are documented are usable by Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. It might not be entirely clear in our documentation unfortunately, but the "omnilink standard tags" are actually just an extension of Google's app-indexing tags, and are fully compatible with their initiative.

[full disclosure, I'm an engineer at URX]

Great batchmates building a great company. Many congratulations to John, James, Andrew, Nate and the whole team.

Sounds like a poor mans Android Intent. Why would an app developer include yet another third party service in their app?

Because they don't know better. Sadly, there's no way to control bloat in Android, just like permissions. No way to disable worthless background services and autostarts.

@smrtinsert, just a couple of things to clarify:

1. There is no third-party service that needs to be intergrated into the mobile application for omnilinks; you can simply prepend "http://urx.io/" in front of your normal web URL, and, assuming you have deeplinks installed on your mobile application, we will try to bring your users to the app if they have it installed.

2. It does a little more than any Android intent. It works across all platforms and degrades gracefully; you can't text a plain Android intent to a restaurant on Yelp and have an iPhone recipient view the content.

[full disclosure, I'm an engineer at URX]

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