Deep linking: what to get right first

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you only fix one thing about deep linking this quarter, make it the first item below.

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Start here

Every shareable screen should have a URL. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The failure mode is not doing it wrong, it is doing it once and assuming it stays done.

Then this

Broken links from email and ads waste real spend. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Eventually

Test the case where the app is not installed. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

How to tell if yours is fine

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
• Broken links from email and ads waste real spend — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.