How to open an Android app from a web link

The goal sounds simple: someone taps a link on a web page and your Android app opens on exactly the right screen. Android gives you three ways to do it, and they range from rock solid to works on your phone, fails on theirs. Here they are, best first.

Publish /.well-known/assetlinks.json on your domain with your app's package name and signing fingerprint, and declare the matching intent filter in the app. Now a plain https://yourdomain.com/path link opens your app directly — no chooser — and falls back to the web page when the app isn't installed. It's the most work up front and by far the least trouble afterward.

If you can't verify a domain, the intent:// form lets you target the app and bake in a fallback URL in one link, so no app sends the user to a web page or the Play Store instead of an error. Chrome on Android handles it well. The downsides: it's verbose, and plenty of in-app browsers ignore it.

myapp://path is the quick one every tutorial shows. It works on a device that has the app, and it fails with no fallback everywhere else. Use it to test your routing, not to send real users.

However you build the link, if it's tapped inside Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok's webview, the handoff to your app may never happen — those browsers don't play nicely with app-opening. Plan for it: prefer App Links, offer an open-in-browser option, and test from inside a social app, not just your home screen.

You can't publish assetlinks.json for an app you didn't build. To reliably send people into an app you don't control — YouTube, Amazon, your store — a routing service like directinapp does the intent-or-fallback logic per platform for you, with no SDK, and copes with the webview cases that break hand-rolled links.