Growing the App Links Community

We introduced App Links at F8 2014 as a cross platform standard for deep linking. We've now seen more than 1,000 developers create more than 7 billion App Links-enabled URLs, contributing to the global growth of the open standard.

App Links is designed to create a universal standard for linking on mobile, so developers can easily link to other mobile apps and make it easy for other apps to link to them. And for people, this means they can click a link to an app on mobile and go directly to that app if it's installed on their phone. App Links is also an open protocol, so developers can customize the code in a way that makes sense for their apps.

Microsoft recently announced the Bing search engine will support App Links. Bing is expanding its search index to include apps and app actions so content from App Links enabled apps can appear in mobile Bing search results. This can help drive more installs, engagement, and re-engagement for your app.

“Bing has embraced App Links as one of the open standards for app publishers to participate in our index of Apps and App actions – which allows our searchers to naturally discover and re-engage with their apps directly from Bing and Bing-powered search,” said Vincent Wehren, Senior Product Lead for Bing.

We're going to continue investing in the App Links ecosystem and add App Links support to more Facebook products and services. We recently made it simpler for advertisers on Facebook to deep link directly to their content from mobile app install ads. For example, a travel app can run a Facebook ad promoting a trip to San Francisco, and then send people directly to that San Francisco deal (rather than the app's homepage) when they first open the app after installation. Advertisers can also use the same features when they run a mobile app re-engagement ad.

We're excited to see the power of App Links extending across apps to help developers provide people with the best experiences on mobile. Take a peek at our docs to get started, or visit GitHub to view our sample apps.