

Branch’s Deep Links Let You Preview Apps in Your Browser - sdpurtill
http://techcrunch.com/2015/08/12/branchs-deep-links-let-you-preview-apps-in-your-browser/

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maephet
Hey guys - one of the creators of this here. I wrote a blog post summarizing
the thing in case you prefer a less TechCrunch-ey version:
[https://blog.branch.io/branch-deepviews-the-missing-link-
in-...](https://blog.branch.io/branch-deepviews-the-missing-link-in-app-
discovery)

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Axsuul
Nice write up! Makes the feature much easier to understand and it's good that
you've provided feedback from those who use it already in production.

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jfreeney
This feature is the foundation of so much potential that I am giddy!

Being able to expand content offerings in such a distributed but definable way
is going to turbo charge our efforts this year at YETi CGI.

Already today we started work testing deepviews to share opps from #points,
our new ambient gamification platform. They will allow us to be so much more
effective in onboarding users to immersive activity.

Thank You Branch :)

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happiily
This is a fantastic new update to what is already a powerful tool for mobile-
focused products. We've had to maintain a separate web infrastructure to allow
users to preview and interact with content which this eliminates. I'm looking
forward to experimenting with this asap.

Disclosure: I'm an investor and was an early adopter of Branch.

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timesfree
Can we take users on desktop browsers to the iTunes Store page instead of
texting a download link?

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dstaten
TL;DR you can, but you lose the ability to pass data through install.

Absolutely. The unfortunately side effect is when these users open your app,
you won't know where they came from. Using text-me-the-app allows us to link a
desktop link click to the same user downloading on mobile and opening the app.
You lose the ability to pass data through install, and you lose install
attribution. It's a tradeoff--for you, personalizing onboarding, rewarding
users or having install attribution may be less important than taking them
straight to the App Store.

You can either point desktop users to the App Store on an app-wide basis
([https://dashboard.branch.io/#/settings/link](https://dashboard.branch.io/#/settings/link))
or on a per-link basis using the reserved key $desktop_url (as Abbey pointed
out). Let me know if this is unclear.

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zfrankel
Looks cool, but wondering how much control we get over the UI of the preview
page?

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dstaten
We are going to automate the uploading of templates within the coming weeks--
the goal is to have a library of open-source templates that anyone can use, or
contribute to. When you create or edit an existing template, you’ll have the
option to make it public or private. Even cooler than that is that we’ll allow
you to customize the templates to make use of whatever custom tags that you
choose to attach to the links.

If you want to use a custom template now, drop a note to support@branch.io and
we'll get it uploaded for you.

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ellenle
Game changer. Super excited for this!

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keajer
This is very cool, great work!

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rinthe
awesome! very useful:)

