is it possible that a deep link in an app is changing?
I have an app where I save a deep link to the sheet and then use rebrandly to shorten and brand the link and today I see that many of the deep link don’t work anymore and are taking the user to the app homescreen.
IMPORTANT!
The new deep links that were created in the last week are all working correctly and only older links stopped working.
Appreciates your input on this, We need to know and trust that the deep links don’t change as we share them in many places.
Did you reorder, add, or change any tabs? I think part of that deep link is possibly the tab index. If that index changes, then it may be attempting to go to a different tab and the rest of the hierarchy isn’t there, so it defaults to the home screen.
Ive had to create a second app that just houses the public bios (like your business cards) just so I can guarantee that the deep link doesnt change. They are too unstable otherwise based on my use case.
My first app is used as a dashboard to manipulate the data in the second app.
Just adding a tab, especially if it’s located before the tab that was affected, could renumber the tab indexes for everything. I’m only speculating, but if the tab index changed on your existing tab due to a new tab being added above it, then that may be what’s causing the link to break. I’m guessing that the index of the tab is in the deep link and is being used to locate the correct tab in the app to navigate to along with other attributes that guide it to the correct row in the correct list or screen. Again, I’m only speculating. I don’t fully understand how the deep links are structured other than what I could see when I decoded them, which is still a bit cryptic. There’s several attributes encoded into that link (which appears to be JSON) such as app name, description, author, rowid, and some other attributes that I’m not clear on. I think someone speculated a while back that the “t” attribute was the tab index.
Ah, yea I have to personally go into the second public app and press the button to trigger the creation of a Rebrandly Deep link.
In your case… you cant really add much to your existing app without risking breaking the DL as I dont think we know 100% of all the things that could potentially break it.
Thank you. it makes some sense and I guess I wont do any more changes to the tabs but I would really be happy if someone from the glide team will comment on this as If I can’t trust the deep link to work correctly i will need to find an alternative to the whole solution in glide maybe.
it’s not a matter of compering but rather trust that it doesn’t change otheriwse my customers won’t be able to share the business csrd and make sure that it works
It seems to me that the deep link encodes the name(!) of the screen and not just the ID. If you change the name of that screen for what reason ever, all deep links go broke.
This is not what one expects → It’s useless to give the deep link to your users if you still develop your app.
There is another parameter t=xx in the link, which changed in all my links, does anyone know what it stands for?