How to enable DEEP LINKING in your app

Deep linking is one of the methods for launching a mobile application via a link. That link could be simply a link on a web page or a google search result. As you click on a link your device provides you with the options to select between various apps that are able to open that particular link. Using deep linking you can make your app one of the option to open some particular type of link.

Deep Links can be used to call any activity within your app, it could be your home page or may be a product/category page for an e-commerce application.

To enable deep linking all you need to do is to create an intent-filter inside the <activity> (activity tag of the activity you wish to open via the link) in the android manifest.

For example, have a look at the below-given code segment

As you can see the above intent filter contains three tags action, category and data, so let’s discuss them in details.

<action> = Specify the ACTION_VIEW intent action so that the intent filter can be reached from Google Search.

<category> = This intent filter includes two categories tag. First one is DEFAULT which makes the intent filter accessible from any specified link other than google’s search results. And the second one is BROWSABLE which makes the intent filter accessible from a web browser.

<data> = This tag represents the URI format for the activity will respond. The above code segment accepts the links begin with “http://magento.webkul.com/Mobikul”. The intent filter may contain more the one data tags and the activity will respond to all of them. The pathPrefix and host attributes are optional.

That’s all you need to make your app come alive through a web link. We will learn to handle the deep links in the next blog.

Thank you very much, this is Vedesh Kumar signing off …