“Before Apple Inc. ever confirmed last fall it was making a watch, mobile game makers plotted how to find ‘Candy Crush’ gold on the device,” Sarah E. Needleman reports for The Wall Street Journal. “Game developers have released hundreds of apps since Apple first started taking orders for the watch in early April, hoping to capture the kind of success they’ve had with the iPhone. But finding a…
“The Apple Watch has a punctuality problem: apps are slow to load, which could defeat the whole point of having a gadget to deliver information at a glance,” Tim Higgins reports for Bloomberg.
“To fix that, Apple Inc. will unveil new tools for the programmers writing applications for the device,” Higgins reports. “The upgrade will be one of the key highlights of the iPhone maker’s…
Google Changes Chrome to Prevent Abusive Deeplinking
Note: The article was updated below with a comment from Google.
As we noted yesterday, the latest version 40 of Chrome on Android no longer allows deeplinks to be triggered by the web page without direct user interaction. This was noted in the issue 459156 and confirmed by AppsFlyer.
We speculated whether it was a bug or an intentional change and after a few tips and more research we confirmed that this is not a short term bug, but a permanent change to the way Android browser handles intent URLs, which was finally confirmed earlier today in the comments for the issue. This for all intents and purposes breaks the most popular deeplinking solutions on Android, including App Links, DeepLink and URX.
How it all started
The issue got on Google's radar over a year ago. A Chrome engineer was surprised to find that going to Pandora.com would automatically launch Pandora app if installed, instead of opening Pandora's website. This behaviour was deemed broken and filed as a bug last year.
Pandora of course wasn't hit by a random bug: they were intentionally detecting users who already had the app installed and were taking them straight to the app, assuming that's what they wanted in the first place. But this did not sit well with Google and was slated to be fixed.
Unfortunately, this type of functionality is leaned on heavily by deeplinking companies to detect whether the app is present on a system. If found, user is deeplinked directly into the app, otherwise they're sent to an appropriate mobile web page.
Does it need fixing?
User intent is paramount when it comes to browser behaviour. Having web pages that navigate away from the browser without user interaction makes for a crappy user experience. This behaviour can be abused in many ways and often surprises users even when not abused (as in the Pandora example above). Chrome engineers were very specific in their feedback around this, including another tracked issue where they said (emphasis ours):
From the omnibox, no, there is no plans to allow external redirects. If typing in the omnibox, the user is showing a strong intent to stay within chrome, so we made the decision to not allow external redirects (too many of them led to what we believed to be bad user experiences).
Clicking on a link should still behave as before and redirect to market:// links.
As it stands, how can I programmatically redirect a user to the play store?
There is no plans to support a redirect without a user gesture.
Apple had a similar problem in Safari just over a year ago: browsing random websites would inexplicably open the App Store page for Clash of Clans and a few other games. As TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez reported then:
For many weeks now, mobile users on both iOS and Android have been encountering a problem where visits to certain websites and apps have automatically redirected them to the platform’s app store to download various games. The issue involves errant ad networks, which should be blocking these shady ads, but aren’t. Meanwhile, mobile consumers simply trying to use an app or read an article are treated to a poor user experience.
Apple has since fixed the problem in Safari without neutering the budding deeplinking ecosystem that grew dependent on this feature, but Google has a harder job on its hands due to the more powerful nature of Android intent URLs.
What this means going forward
The ability to use JavaScript to detect-then-launch apps on Android will be severely limited. Google is recognizing that this will limit their platform in several important ways and are already cooking up a solution in the form of App Install Alerts.
App Install Alerts are native Chrome banners, very similar to Apple's Smart App Banners, that will act as intermediaries between the website and its native app. Unfortunately, this won't help with the many marketing problems deeplinking companies have set out to solve.
To find out exactly how your deeplinking campaigns on Android will be affected check with your deeplinking partner. Tapstream customers are not affected by this, as we rely on deferred deeplinks to carry intent.
Update March 14: Google has gracefully responded to our first post - it sounds like there is an undocumented way to get around the current limitations, which deeplinking companies can use to route around this change (which will hopefully be a simple fix):
I will try and get some notes up about the fallback URL’s up as quickly as possible because it neatly solves a lot of issues for deep-app-linking, where as JS redirecting is a massive hack-around.
As close observers of mobile platforms have noticed, the latest Chrome build has seriously degraded the functionality of deeplinks on Android. The Intent URLs can no longer be triggered from on-page JavaScript, causing all sorts of problems for app marketers.
The impact to Android users is significant:
Apps that utilize deeplinks will not launch
Apps that have rich in-app webview content (including Facebook) can no longer open Intent URLs
Facebook's own App Links standard, designed to make deeplinking easier for developers, has been severely degraded and can no longer provide fallback URLs to those who don't have the target app installed
Platforms like URX and DeepLink.me no longer work as designed, which may mean many wasted advertising dollars on Android
Many other mobile marketing platforms are presenting a broken user experience to their advertisers
Apps with rich and equivalent content in both their app and on their site can no longer use a non-Play Store destination as their fallback URL if the Android user doesn't have the app already installed. That means if they're not using a deferred deeplink product like Onboarding Links, the user's intent will be lost
The technical details for this change are complex to describe, but it revolves around Chromium no longer able to launch certain intent URLs from JavaScript. This problem was confirmed by AppsFlyer in Issue 459156. The original submission from February 17 2015 reads:
What is the expected behavior?
Should redirect to Play Market or open page inside the app
Getting ERR_UNKNOWN_URL_SCHEME all the time, exept window.open call
What went wrong?
Did this work before? Yes In Chrome 38.x
A similar bug filed for webview was opened on February 24 2015.
What's changed?
Deeplink companies commonly use JavaScript to attempt to redirect users to a deeplink. Recently, Google Chrome on Android was updated to version 40. The new version of Google Chrome does not support redirecting to non-HTTP/S URL schemes (including intent:// and custom app URL schemes like fb://) via JavaScript.
Redirects to these types of destinations still work if they're performed by a redirect link instead of JavaScript, but that is not how they're commonly used.
Why the change?
There are three possible reasons for this change in behaviour in Chrome:
A bug: Chrome is just swallowing unrecognized URL schemes instead of passing them to the Android intent handler like it should
Protection from naughty ads: JavaScript redirects to the app store are sometimes used in ad injections. This was a big problem on iOS for a time
Google's preparing to produce their own way of doing this, perhaps something like the Smart App Banner on iOS. This would tie in nicely with their efforts to improve mobile SEO and their newly released Web App Install Banners.
If you're affected by this bug we'd love to hear from you.
Note for Tapstream customers: we are not affected by this bug, as we don't use JavaScript to launch URLs.
Update March 13: Some more information was gleaned thanks to a few tips and it seems that the new behaviour is not a bug. It was implemented to curtail some undesirable behaviour (option #2 in our three possible reasons above). Read more in our full update.
One of Tapstream's core strengths is our ability to process our firehose of data in real-time. But this can make troubleshooting tricky – with so much data, it's tough to pick out and analyze a particular session or data point during your integration or deployment phase.
That's why we launched a complete overhaul of our dashboard's Live tab. The new Live tab gives you the same visibility in to your Tapstream firehose as Tapstream's real-time processor has. Check it out in your dashboard and follow along:
Filter your stream
Troubleshooting from your dev environment? Punch in your workstation or test device's public-facing IP address, and see data only from that IP.
See your real-time data stream, as it happens
The live tab renders your traffic in real time, showing campaign clicks, website visits, and in-app events as they happen.
Drill in to sessions
See exactly what a particular user did before they installed your app, and get real-time updates on their activity.
See complete metadata
Expand a node to see everything Tapstream recorded about it, including custom parameters, hardware IDs, user agents, and campaign data.
We built this tool to reduce time to resolution, increase transparency in to your data, and help you understand your users. We think you'll love it - let us know what you think.
Today we're expanding the reach of our platform further than ever.
For the first time your campaign data will automatically sync with the freshly released iTunes Connect App Analytics, just in time for iOS 8 release. This is an industry first, and will make both your Tapstream dashboard and the new iTC App Analytics a lot more useful.
We are also working with several ad networks specializing in native ads to provide accurate attribution and performance tracking for this growing ad trend. One of the early partners is Appsfire: “We’re really excited that native ads are taking off,” says CEO Ouriel Ohayon. “Having attribution providers like Tapstream provide direct performance measurements gives our advertisers the data they need to see the value in these new ads.”
Unlike regular mobile ads, native mobile ads trigger app install without leaving the confines of the host app, making tracking URLs irrelevant. This is where Tapstream's server-side clicks come into play, giving you the same data you get from a non-native ad campaign.
These features are already live in your account - and if you don't have one, it's high time to get started for free.
Everyone wants their app to go "viral". They want it shared and talked about. We at Tapstream are in a unique position to help this process along.
Encouraging users to share app through social media can be a slog - people dislike recommending apps in public forums like their Facebook wall, spamming many friends to reach the few that might care about it. And even worse, these shares are very ineffective, as people develop a type of blindness for recommendations and likes.
But our data told us that one type of social sharing is very effective: messaging.
Text messages (be it SMS or iMessage) have open rates of over 90%. They're fiercely personal. What if your users could spread the word to a few friends via a text message, and get a reward for every install?
And what if you could measure exactly how effective those shares are in terms of click-to-install rates, engagement of new users or even the average revenue per new user?
It makes it super-easy to reward your users for sharing the app with their friends. You have the full control of WoM campaigns, without touching the code. What's even better, you get truly engaged new users willing to give your app a fair shot. And the potential is really big - every app user has at least a few friends who share their taste in apps.
And don't take our word for it. Some of the biggest apps are putting it to good use:
“Fitocracy is a social fitness app with a happy and loyal user base. We’ve built this community through user referrals and it’s been crucial to our growth,” said Vik Panda, Chief Marketing Officer at Fitocracy. “Now with Tapstream’s Word of Mouth, we will be able to easily reward users when they get their friends to join and measure results to improve our mobile marketing campaigns.”
You don't have to be a Tapstream Attribution customer to use Word of Mouth. If you're with another attribution provider it still works beautifully.
So check out our new Word of Mouth and see the results for yourself.
Mobile World Congress is almost upon us and we're giving away a pass to the hottest party in town: Bubble Over Barcelona on Monday night. You will be treated to a great venue, great drinks and even watch a mini TechCrunch pitch off.
This is a small and exclusive event but as a sponsor we'd like to bring you along. We're giving away a pass and all you have to do is retweet our invite. We'll be picking a winner on Sunday night to join us for the VIP treatment.
If you don't win your BoB pass don't despair. We'd still love to see you at Swedish Beers on Wednesday. It will be a great week whichever party you end up at!
