Hello,
Deeplinking in an Ionic hybrid app feels like something that should be really straightforward - but I really struggle to find an ideal solution.
What solution would you recommend, and if it’s one of these three, how to overcome their flaws ?
If your goal is to implement deeplinking, respectively providing one link to your users and potential users which link them to the corresponding stores and then forward parameters you would pass in the url when they have installed and started the app, I would recommend branch.io. I’m even not aware of any other solutions to properly implement such features.
As you said above, ionic-plugin-deeplinks is maintained by the community, so I don’t know the status there
Custom-URL-scheme isn’t properly a deep link solution. It could be use to start the app with an url like yourapp:// but only once the users have installed it
Hi 
Well, as I said, the issue I find with branch.io is that is seems a huge thing for not much, and also it’s a paying service if I understand their website well.
ionic-plugin-deeplinks as I said has me discovering a huge bug - can’t build with Android --prod.
Maybe I should explain myself better also : what I’m trying to accomplish is the following scenario :
- When the user receives a link (www.myapp.com/res/1), if the app is installed on his device, it should open the app directly with parameters.
- If the app is not installed, it opens the website - I would then show a prompt to try and have the user install the app, with a link to the app stores.
- When the user installs the app, forward the params coming from the original link (if possible - this is optional).
Except step 3, it seems like a pretty usual thing to me. Yet, oddly, I found it very difficult to find a good way to implement it.
Well what you are trying to accomplish is what branch.io is meant for
If you found any other solutions or if someone as one, I would like to hear that, ping me
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Okay, so I looked a little deeper into branch.io. It seems quite nice, actually, and the free tier could be okay for a starter… But it’s still a very large solution. I simply have one, and only one, url pattern that should be shared and used the way I described earlier - and that’s for the foreseeable future as well. I think I will try to implement something using Eddy’s Custom-URL-scheme and some UX tricks on the browser’s side first. If it’s sufficient for our requirements, then all good. Otherwise, we’ll see - that is if I don’t find another solution till then.
As I said above, my understanding is that Custom-URL-scheme do not work as long as the app isn’t installed, therefore it only covers a part of the solution…but anyhow let me know what solution you will implement at the end, if you achieve your use case as described without branch.io it will be definitely interesting