uLink: User-defined deep links in mobile apps

Web deep links are instrumental to many fundamental user experiences such as navigating to one web page from another, bookmarking a page, or sharing it with others. Such experiences are not possible with individual pages inside mobile apps, since historically mobile apps did not have links equivalent to web deep links. Mobile deep links, introduced in recent years, still lack many important properties of web deep links. Unlike web links, mobile deep links need significant developer effort, cover a small number of predefined pages, and are defined statically to navigate to a page for a given link, but not to dynamically generate a link for a given page. uLink is a novel deep linking mechanism that addresses these problems. uLink brings the equivalent of web URLs to mobile apps. With uLink, users can bookmark links to app pages, and even search previously-seen app pages with content of interest.

Date:

July 1, 2016