custom url schemes in twitter posts it does not work

Question

I am an ios app developer. We have implemented a custom URL scheme 'my_app://section_name' or so where if the link is opened in the user's mobile browser, it will redirect the user to a specific section in the app.

We would like to be able to tweet these URLs and have users on their mobile device click on them to open up the app, however it just can click once (when you click close , maybe you click wrong then you want to click it second but it does not work )

I hope this isn't too silly of a question. Thanks

Does this issue only occur from within Twitter's website, or elsewhere? — Liam, Dec 05 '12 at 07:17
Yes，It's only occur from within Twitter's website.Could you know something about that? — user1872249, Dec 07 '12 at 07:25
it's likely that it's something they're doing (Twitter) that's blocking it, javascript, caching, etc... You could try sending users to an interstitial page on your own website which does the checking and redirecting from there? — Liam, Dec 07 '12 at 07:33
sorry, it's a page that is between point A (twitter) and point B (your app). Ideally, it should not even display to the user, it should handle the query (check if app is installed) and redirect to the URL-scheme URL to launch your app. — Liam, Dec 07 '12 at 08:01
actually, i fear i may be wrong... http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4180272/detect-installed-iphone-app-using-php sorry. — Liam, Dec 07 '12 at 08:04
Thank you, i know that.Maybe you are right. Do you know how to register myself website? — user1872249, Dec 07 '12 at 08:12
How to register a website: http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/registerdomain.shtml — Liam, Dec 07 '12 at 08:19

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 06 '12 at 16:45

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Make sure to check the tweet body after it have been posted.

This may be due of an URL shortener, especially if the tweet is posted from the iOS 5 Twitter framework.

answered Dec 06 '12 at 16:45

Thibaut LE LEVIER

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Sorry,i don't know what you mean. Can you tell me in detail? – user1872249 Dec 07 '12 at 07:33
First try to create a test page to check you url schemes. How do you create the tweets containing the links? – Thibaut LE LEVIER Dec 07 '12 at 15:08

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 20 '13 at 20:08

I'm having a similar issue with url schemes. We can include them in emails and text messages, and they highlight and work properly.

Unfortunately, when we do the same with a tweet, the iOS Twitter client fails to recognise the special URL scheme and so the user cannot tap on it to open our app.

Pretty big oversight, methinks. Anyone else had any joy including special URL scheme links in tweets?

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Sep 26 '19 at 09:21

A solution that you should consider involves not sharing the URI scheme directly, but rather creating a page on your web server to handle this. In fact, if you want to be able to share full URI schemes with paths, you're better off building a web server to dynamically generate a page with a URI scheme redirect.

This is a over-simplified representation of what we built at Branch. This includes some code to get you started though the web server will require a bit of setup not described here.

instead of testapp://some.data.here, you'll link to http://yoursite.com/hosted-redirect/some.data.here.
your server should listen at the route /hosted-redirect, grab some.data.here and build the following page (body here):

_{(source: derrrick.com)}

So your server will have to generate and respond with this page, filling in some.data.here, anytime http://yoursite.com/hosted-redirect/some.data.here is requested.

A lightweight node app could do this with a single file.

custom url schemes in twitter posts it does not work

3 Answers3