[joehewitt]

I'm just now learning about how Android solves this problem. That's great, but the problem remains on iOS. Protocol handlers in browsers don't help here because the problem has to do with http urls.

If iOS allowed me to launch native apps with http URLs, I would never have written this post. They don't, they only suport custom protocol schemes. I'm trying to lessen the importance of custom protocol schemes here by providing a service to silently map http URLs to the custom URLs so users never see them.

[drivebyacct2]

I've asked the question in this same comment thread, but how will this webservice idea solve this problem? Do you not still need an OS or browser level abstraction to look up (every?) url with this webservice to determine if there is an appropriate app specific url? What if I don't want to open the (limited) Facebook app?

[joehewitt]

Here's an example of the problem it solves. I never log into Facebook in Safari because the Facebook app is a much better experience on iOS. Often I tap on links in native apps which go to facebook.com, and then I'm looking at the Facebook login page instead of the content I want to see.

This solution would allow apps (if they choose to use this service) to turn facebook.com URLs into fb:// URLs, and take me where I really want to go when I click those links.

Ideally iOS would provide this URL mapping, as Android does, so that this happened everywhere, not just apps that use this service. I wish Apple would do this. In the mean time, this is one approach we could take.