Starting Android app from app link not working. Why not?

Question

Using Xamarin with C#. What I want is to start my app based on a link in an email or sms. It doesn't have to be an http or https scheme. I am trying that and can't get it to work. I am doing the standard stuff (names changed):

<activity android:name=".MyActivity" android:launchMode="singleTask" >
<intent-filter>
<category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
<category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
<action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
<data
android:host="www.mysite.com"
android:pathPrefix="/myapp"
android:scheme="https" />
</intent-filter>
</activity>

but when I send myself a text with https://www.mysite.com/myapp it doesn't work. I just get the 404 error (since that url does not really exist on our website).

I thought I had to put a name attribute in the declaration of MyActivity (in MyActivity.cs), but when I do that, I get a compile error:

xxx.MyActivity at AndroidManifest.xml:159:5-164:16 duplicated with element declared at AndroidManifest.xml:101:5-108:16 (I changed this to xxx to obscure real name)

So I have no idea why this doesn't work. I don't really need an https or http scheme -- I really just want something like

com.mysite.myapp://myapp

but I figured I would test with an http scheme since it would show up as a hyperlink in the text. I'm sure I had this working a few years ago. I am missing something here. Did something change? What is the best way to do this? Thanks

Answer 1

Hello,

There's nothing wrong with how you started.

I noticed that you used https as your scheme. In my testing, I will open a browser and get a 404 response when use HTTP or HTTPS scheme.

You can try the following steps:

Step1. Use a customized string as your scheme, such as 'myapp'.

Step2. Send a link to your web server page in your SMS message.

Step3. In the web page, you need to use redirection function to your URL, such as adding JavaScript code window.location.href="yourURL.

In the documentation, there has shown the other way: Deep-Link.

You can refer to this documentation from Configuring App-Linking in Android 6.0 and Add Android App Links for sample.

Best Regards,

Alec Liu.

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