Before you invest in deep linking

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Before you spend anything on deep linking, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Every shareable screen should have a URL
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

Broken links from email and ads waste real spend. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Test the case where the app is not installed. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What this looks like day to day

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. Three things worth confirming about deep linking before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Every shareable screen should have a URL — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.