I think Android definitely has a stronger story than iOS, but Android also allows any app to handle any url, so multiple apps can attempt to handle a domain (like facebook.com), whereas app links allows you to direct the link to a single app (or a suite of apps).

"mobile" also means more than just iOS and Android, although they're the two dominant platforms today.

Really it's a step backwards from Android if you overspecify to the point of saying the exact target app (which Android does support, but shouldn't generally be used between applications).

The whole point is to allow different apps to be swapped without the others needing to change. All this does is tie everything too closely together, and more likely than not to Facebook.

All Applinks is doing on Android is using the package name you specify in the metadata.

There's really not a lot going on here. Webpage scheme that you can parse to build an intent from. This couldn't be more than 50 lines of code. It would be less if they decided to use a custom URI scheme like "applinks://example.com?packagename=example.com" instead of parsing every webpage you go to looking for the applinks headers.

> but Android also allows any app to handle any url, so multiple apps can attempt to handle a domain (like facebook.com), whereas app links allows you to direct the link to a single app (or a suite of apps).

So Applinks suddenly removes the ability of 3rd party apps to say "we can handle this content". I can see why big players like FB would want it - I think this is a bad thing for small players and hence the open ecosystem.

Right. Like this supports Windows Phone. And the potential advantage would be one URL scheme rather than a pattern for each OS.

what happens if two iOS apps try to register the same scheme?

I believe that the behavior is undefined, but I haven't checked since iOS 7 came out. The docs used to say it was undefined, and I think people reported that it would pick the app that was most recently installed.

So does the iPhone, it's not really that hard to implement IMO.

iOS apps can do this as well.

iOS apps cannot handle (or intercept) http/https urls, they can only register a custom scheme with the OS and handle those.

Ah, yes. This is true. Although the original statement was "android apps can handle their own urls" which I interpreted differently.