The growth of deep linking is one of the reasons apps seem more intuitive lately. When a user wants to get from one app to another, a deep mobile link opens one app inside another directly to the action the user needs, without them having to leave, open the other app and find what they were looking for.
But to enable deep linking, app developers need tools. Now, a new API from mobile deep linking startup URX aims to make linking as easy on the development side as it is for the end user.
(Related: User experience is the key to mobile application success)
The newly announced beta for URX’s App Search API allows developers to search and deep-link specific inter-application paths, predicting the relevant actions and content flows users will follow to make the inter-app experience more seamless. The simple search removes some of the more laborious coding from deep linking between apps by referencing a URX knowledge graph for specific points of user context.
According to a blog post from URX cofounder and CEO John Milinovich, URX engineers have spent the past year building the knowledge graph on top of existing app content. The graph crawls and indexes linked data, allowing developers to search by factors including location, keyword, time and intended action, to which the API then returns relevant metadata in JSON or HTML to create the deep link.
“Not only can developers weave apps into a seamless experience with the App Search API, they can also discover the best place to link users based on the apps on their devices,” Milinovich wrote on the company’s blog. “For example, let’s say someone is reading an article in your app that declares ‘Fancy’ by Iggy Azalea to be the song of the summer. With the URX App Search API, you could find a deep link to an app like Spotify on the user’s phone that would let them listen to the song with a single click.”
The graph encompasses apps that use Facebook, Google or Twitter tags, and it allows developers to change how results are displayed to the user based on whether they have a given linked app installed. URX is currently looking for developers to test out the integrations, sample libraries and SDKs set for release in the coming weeks.
More information about deep linking and the beta App Search API can be found on URX’s blog.
