when my app is not intalled, iOS universal link in UIWebView will launch Safari?

1
votes

From Apple's guide in Support Universal Links:

When you support universal links, iOS 9 users can tap a link to your website and get seamlessly redirected to your installed app without going through Safari. If your app isn’t installed, tapping a link to your website opens your website in Safari.

But i'm confused that if my app is not installed,and I tap a universal link of my app in another app's UIWebView,will the system launch Safari app to load my website,or still load it in the UIWebView?

I test some app's universal links when the app is not installed,and they never launch Safari to load the next page ,they still load it in the UIWebView.

I want to konw if it's possible to launch Safari,but not stay in UIWebView.Do I need any configuration in apple-app-site-association file?

Actually I want to trace where my app was installed from by using cookie.I can store a cookie in Safari with informations of the download page,and get the cookie with SFSafariViewController when my app is installed and opened,and present different views according to the cookie.

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iosiphoneuiwebviewdeep-linkingios-universal-links
You can replace http:// with itms:// or itms-apps:// to avoid redirects. – Shahrukh
Using URI schemes is not a great solution for third-party apps, because if the app isn't installed then there will be an error message and nothing else happens. – Alex Bauer

1 Answers

1
votes

What you are trying to build is called 'deferred deep linking'. This (plus a lot more) is exactly what we provide at Branch.io. If you want to avoid the headache of configuring it all yourself, give this a look. Apps like Pinterest, Airbnb, and Tinder all use us for this reason.

Apple's documentation is referring to the default behavior with the standalone Safari browser. Handling links inside an app with UIWebView supersedes this, and there is no way to automatically bounce out of the origin app into the main Safari app.

The workaround is to store data on your own backend. As you've discovered, relying on a cookie pass-through on the device itself won't work in many cases.