Three myths about deep linking

The gap between knowing this and actually doing it is where most teams lose ground. A few things about deep linking that get repeated more often than they get checked.

You do not control the device, the network, or the operating system version, and the design has to accept that. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

“It only matters for big sites”

Every shareable screen should have a URL. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

“We can deal with it after launch”

Sometimes true, usually expensive. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

“Our platform handles it”

Test the case where the app is not installed. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. 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

Mobile releases are slower to correct than web ones, so the cost of shipping a mistake is higher. 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

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