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App Links Reaches More Than a Billion Mobile Destinations

July 1, 2014ByGokhan Caglar

On April 30 at f8, we introduced App Links, an open, cross platform standard for linking on mobile. Since then, hundreds of apps have adopted App Links, including Spotify, Mailbox, Quip, Hulu, Redfin, Goodreads, Live Nation, and Vimeo. Third party SDKs such as the Xamarin SDK and the Facebook.NET SDK have also embraced the standard. To date, developers have enabled more than a billion unique App Links on mobile.

With App Links, you can drive people into your app directly from stories on Facebook, whether they're published from your app, from a Page, or from people copying and pasting URLs. Starting today, you'll also be able to use App Links in mobile app ads through our Preferred Marketing Developers.

Redfin CTO Sasha Aickin summarizes why his company adopted App Links: "When you are on your phone and click on a Redfin link, App Links takes you to the Redfin app for a more seamless home shopping experience. This is obviously great for our customers and it solves a frustrating development problem that my team — and every other mobile developer — has faced over the years.”

Perhaps the best part about App Links is how easy it is to integrate. Simply copy and paste a few tags into your website header to get started. If you have a mobile-only app, you can publish tags directly using the App Links Hosting API. Here's an example for an iOS app:

<meta property="al:ios:url" content="redfin://home/54474091" />
<meta property="al:ios:app_store_id" content="327962480" />
<meta property="al:ios:app_name" content="Redfin Real Estate" />

Learn about how you can integrate App Links into your app by reading the documentation.