Deep Blue Links
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How Deep Blue Links works

Deep Blue Links gives every app its own link host, serves the files iOS and Android need to trust it, and resolves each link back to a destination inside your app.

Deep Blue Links turns a destination inside your app, such as /products/1234, into a short link like https://demo.dev.thedbl.ink/Xy3kP9aQ. When the app is installed, the link opens it directly. When it isn't, the link shows a preview page and sends the visitor to the App Store or Google Play, and your app gets the link on its first launch after the install.

The pieces

  • Organization: your team's account. Its plan sets how many links its apps can create each month, and its members have the Admin or Editor role.
  • App: one mobile app with its iOS and Android identifiers. Each app gets a link host named after it, https://{app}.dev.thedbl.ink, and up to two API keys: a live key and a sandbox key.
  • Link: a destination in the app, with a short URL and the title, description and image of its preview.
  1. The app is installed. iOS and Android check the link host's apple-app-site-association and assetlinks.json files, which Deep Blue Links serves from your app's settings, and open your app with the URL. Your app sends the URL to POST /api/links/resolve and routes to the path of the longUrl it gets back.
  2. The app isn't installed. The browser opens the short URL, and Deep Blue Links serves a preview page with the link's title, description and image. After a moment it sends iPhones and iPads to the App Store, Android phones to Google Play, and everything else to the link's fallback URL.
  3. The app is installed from that page. On its first launch the app asks which link brought the user: on Android it reads the link from the Play install referrer, and elsewhere it calls POST /api/links/check-deferred. See Deferred deep links.

A link also carries social metadata, so when it's shared in a chat or a post it shows its title, description and image.

Integrating your app

  1. Create your app in the dashboard and generate its API keys.
  2. Let your app open its links: add the link host to its associated domains on iOS and to an intent filter on Android.
  3. Resolve each link that opens your app, and check for a deferred link on its first launch.
  4. Create links in the dashboard, or from your servers with the API.

The guides walk through steps 2 and 3 for iOS, Android, Flutter, React Native, Capacitor and .NET (MAUI, Android and iOS). The server guide covers creating links from your backend, and the API reference lists every endpoint. Each guide has a runnable example app in the examples repository on GitHub.