Hi there,
i was reading from google dev support that they recommend that I ‘deep link’ my app,
so google can search it.
Any idea how to do that within corona (maybe with an example?)
thanks
chris
Engineering said:
Since you are using Enterprise, you can do it the native way. You would also need to use our CoronaActivity APIs to get this working.
For non-Enterprise builds, you should still be able to get parameters via launchArgs. You will just have to set up the Intent Filters inside of build.settings to do this.
Rob
Hi Rob,
thanks for your answer.
I use the Pro Version and not the Enterprise version.
Would u have an example. I dont get still the whole idea about the deep linking. just understood that it would improve my chance to get better positioning as keywords from the app would be taking in consideration.
What does this has to do with the LaunchArgs?
As small example would be really helpful
thanks
chris
The concept of deep linking is when your app starts up or reacts to notification, you can start your app on a different screen. The simplest way to explain this is think about a newpaper’s app. You get a notification about a car fire on a bridge. You interact with the notification and it opens your news app and goes straight to that story. This is deep linking.
In many apps, there is nothing practical to jump to. Perhaps in a multi-player game when you get a notification from the other player that it’s your turn, you could collect enough information from the notification to go to that game and set the player up to play their next turn.
Depending on who you are using for notifications, you should be able to do this with Corona SDK by looking either at launchArgs or the event table when you get a notification event.
If you want a website or some other app to open your app to a specific spot, you need to handle this differently. In iOS terms, this would be a URL scheme. With Android it’s done with “intents”. Since I’m more familiar with the iOS side of how things work, you would register an URL scheme in your build.settings. You would give it a protocol, which needs to be unique such as:
myapp:
Then you can pass URL type parameters like:
myapp://showgamelist
If someone calls that URL on an iOS device, it would start the app known as myapp: and pass showgamelist in as a parameter to launchArgs. Your app could look at that value and jump that that part of your app.
Android does something similar using intents. They are also added to build.settings. These are undocumented and unsupported and you’re on your own to figure out how to implement them. But you can read a forum thread where others have figured it out.
https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/37105-handling-url-scheme-on-android
This would probably be better implemented in Enterprise, but you could have success following that thread.
Rob
Thanks Rob,
that helps me a lot. Also it was not the initial idea to write here in the board 
I had that question longer before and thought simply its not possible … ha
About my initial idea to write here:
http://searchengineland.com/app-indexing-new-frontier-seo-google-search-deep-linking-226517
i guess i missunderstood. Its about app Indexing and deep linking.
Maybe you/corona can explain a bit here, how we as devs could improve our app so it gets a better App-Ranking via this options.
I personally love to do new features, but im bad in marketing. So any advices (like the link above) explained, could help to give me same/better ranking than my competitors.
Best greets
Chris
as i understand it, it’s two sides of the same topic. so 1) if your app supports these deep links, and 2) google’s crawlers find such links “out in the wild”, then google will associate them, presumably just like plain-old backlinks. so just adding deep link support internally won’t do anything for you unless there are a lot of actual links out there for google to discover and “credit” to your app.
Hi Davebollinger,
thanks, that makes sense
greets
chris
I have a related question:
I understand how deep links work for an app that is already installed, but I believe it’s possible to pass a link to the GP store itself (and iOS App Store I think), which would then be passed on to the app once it’s installed. e.g.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quiztix.movies&newsStory=carfirebridge
The user would click this link, be taken to the store and then when they install the original link would be passed to the app, so that the “newsStory=carfirebridge” params could be used.
I’m struggling to find any good examples on how to go about this though, some examples I’ve seen imply that I have to use the referrer intent but I’m not too sure where to start.
Has anyone done this already?
Engineering said:
Since you are using Enterprise, you can do it the native way. You would also need to use our CoronaActivity APIs to get this working.
For non-Enterprise builds, you should still be able to get parameters via launchArgs. You will just have to set up the Intent Filters inside of build.settings to do this.
Rob
Hi Rob,
thanks for your answer.
I use the Pro Version and not the Enterprise version.
Would u have an example. I dont get still the whole idea about the deep linking. just understood that it would improve my chance to get better positioning as keywords from the app would be taking in consideration.
What does this has to do with the LaunchArgs?
As small example would be really helpful
thanks
chris
The concept of deep linking is when your app starts up or reacts to notification, you can start your app on a different screen. The simplest way to explain this is think about a newpaper’s app. You get a notification about a car fire on a bridge. You interact with the notification and it opens your news app and goes straight to that story. This is deep linking.
In many apps, there is nothing practical to jump to. Perhaps in a multi-player game when you get a notification from the other player that it’s your turn, you could collect enough information from the notification to go to that game and set the player up to play their next turn.
Depending on who you are using for notifications, you should be able to do this with Corona SDK by looking either at launchArgs or the event table when you get a notification event.
If you want a website or some other app to open your app to a specific spot, you need to handle this differently. In iOS terms, this would be a URL scheme. With Android it’s done with “intents”. Since I’m more familiar with the iOS side of how things work, you would register an URL scheme in your build.settings. You would give it a protocol, which needs to be unique such as:
myapp:
Then you can pass URL type parameters like:
myapp://showgamelist
If someone calls that URL on an iOS device, it would start the app known as myapp: and pass showgamelist in as a parameter to launchArgs. Your app could look at that value and jump that that part of your app.
Android does something similar using intents. They are also added to build.settings. These are undocumented and unsupported and you’re on your own to figure out how to implement them. But you can read a forum thread where others have figured it out.
https://forums.coronalabs.com/topic/37105-handling-url-scheme-on-android
This would probably be better implemented in Enterprise, but you could have success following that thread.
Rob
Thanks Rob,
that helps me a lot. Also it was not the initial idea to write here in the board I had that question longer before and thought simply its not possible … ha
About my initial idea to write here:
http://searchengineland.com/app-indexing-new-frontier-seo-google-search-deep-linking-226517
i guess i missunderstood. Its about app Indexing and deep linking.
Maybe you/corona can explain a bit here, how we as devs could improve our app so it gets a better App-Ranking via this options.
I personally love to do new features, but im bad in marketing. So any advices (like the link above) explained, could help to give me same/better ranking than my competitors.
Best greets
Chris
as i understand it, it’s two sides of the same topic. so 1) if your app supports these deep links, and 2) google’s crawlers find such links “out in the wild”, then google will associate them, presumably just like plain-old backlinks. so just adding deep link support internally won’t do anything for you unless there are a lot of actual links out there for google to discover and “credit” to your app.
Hi Davebollinger,
thanks, that makes sense
greets
chris
I have a related question:
I understand how deep links work for an app that is already installed, but I believe it’s possible to pass a link to the GP store itself (and iOS App Store I think), which would then be passed on to the app once it’s installed. e.g.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.quiztix.movies&newsStory=carfirebridge
The user would click this link, be taken to the store and then when they install the original link would be passed to the app, so that the “newsStory=carfirebridge” params could be used.
I’m struggling to find any good examples on how to go about this though, some examples I’ve seen imply that I have to use the referrer intent but I’m not too sure where to start.
Has anyone done this already?