Firebase Dynamic Links shut down: the free alternative

Firebase Dynamic Links (FDL) was the free, default way thousands of apps handled deep links and deferred installs. Google shut it down on 25 August 2025, and every FDL link now returns an error. If your onboarding, referral or share links ran through FDL, they are broken today.

Google points people to full mobile-measurement partners like Branch and AppsFlyer. Those are powerful, but they are attribution platforms first — priced in US dollars, often per monthly-active-user or per-install, with a floor that a small app or a D2C brand never needed. Most FDL users only wanted the routing: open the app to the right screen, or the store if it is not there.

Strip away the dashboards and a deep-link replacement has three jobs. First, on a phone with the app installed, open the app to the exact screen — not the home tab. Second, when the app is not installed, send the person to the App Store or Play Store instead of a dead page. Third, on desktop (or when there is no app), fall back to the normal web URL.

A fourth job — restoring the exact screen *after* someone installs and opens the app for the first time (deferred deep linking) — is the hard one. It needs a small SDK inside your app and, on iOS, works within real platform limits. Be sceptical of any tool that promises perfect cross-device, post-install restoration for free; the honest answer is that store fallback covers the common case and deferred restoration is a separate, SDK-based feature.

directinapp is built around the routing job, priced flat in rupees, and free for the core. Here is how the three compare on the things an FDL refugee cares about.

The migration is small because you are replacing the link, not re-architecting the app. Register your app once (its URL scheme and store ids), then create a smart link that points at the screen you want and choose store fallback. Swap the old FDL URL for the new one wherever it was shared. There is a step-by-step in how to replace Firebase Dynamic Links, and you can preview the exact deep links your app fires with the free deep link generator.

If you also want to know which link drove the install or the sale, that is where directinapp goes beyond FDL — the same link keeps a real-time click count, and with conversion tracking it ties the tap to the order it produced.