Deep linking: the questions we get asked most

This is cheap to get right at the start and expensive to retrofit. The questions about deep linking that come up most often on our calls.

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Do we need to care about this?

Every shareable screen should have a URL. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How do we know it is working?

Test the case where the app is not installed. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

The short version

The version of the app your customers are running is rarely the one you just shipped. 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

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.