A Brief History Of Deep Linking.
The iOS App Store used to be simple. Taking a look back at another week of news from Cupertino, this week’s Apple Loop includes a summary of the WWDC 2015 announcements, details on downloading iOS 9, the new features in OSX El Capitan, the native apps SDK for the Apple Watch, details on the Apple Music streaming service, news on the fourth beta of iOS 8.4, the arrival of Apple Pay in the UK, the iPod disappearing from the Apple homepage, and the BlackBerry killing potential of the iPhone.Apple’s new iOS 9 mobile operating system will include tools for developers that can block mobile web ads that would otherwise come through the Safari browser on such phones.Deep linking has become one of the hottest topics in mobile over the past year as dozens of startups have launched around using, improving and discovering deep links.Apple didn’t openly declare war on ads at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, but quietly included a new feature in iOS 9 that will dramatically cut down on mobile ads you see.
Apps were things, little squares you could see and touch, and it made sense to buy them, put them on your phone, and use them one at a time like blades in a Swiss army knife. Apple Loop is here to remind you of a few of the very many discussions that have happened around Apple over the last seven days (and you can read our weekly digest of Android news here on Forbes). Apple’s documentation for developers refers to “Content Blocking Safari Extensions” as a “fast and efficient way to block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups, and other content.” “Consumers have shown that they only want ads and extensions they really are interested in and not sent to them out of context,” says Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin. “They play a role in the overall tech ecosystem so Apple needs to make it easy for people to opt in or opt out.Apple is mainly responding to the demands of consumers who only want things they really care about.” As Joshua Benton writes for the NiemanLab at Harvard, “Think making money on mobile advertising is hard now? Think how much more difficult it will be with a significant share of your audience blocking all your ads — all with a simple download from the App Store.” Apple has been emphasizing privacy during this week’s Worldwide Developer Conference where iOS 9 was previewed, seen as a not so subtle jab at rivals such as Google and Facebook. Our dumb, silo’d apps are slowly but steadily becoming smart, context-aware services that link, share, and talk to each other without us having to necessarily see or touch those little squares.
In the most simple interpretation, a deep link is any link that directs a user past the home page of a website or app to content inside of it. e.g. linking directly to a product instead of the home page. In the context of 2015, we’re particularly interested in mobile deep links; links that can be used to open an app to a specific piece of content or action. Being able to block annoying ads, some of which are awful App Store redirects, will be a huge improvement for the Safari browsing experience, saving you money by using less data and time by loading pages faster. Then Apple announced Proactive, an upgrade to Siri and Spotlight that lets iOS reach inside apps to surface their data and link their functionality without having to open them from your home screen. “Me too”-ness aside, Apple’s post-app future is off the blocks and on Google’s heels.
The company’s WWDC keynote struck a typically utopian note: What’s not to like about an iPhone that behaves more like a personal assistant than a bag of hammers? But the new move is striking fear in the hearts of companies and publishers who rely on you viewing mobile ads to make money. iOS already lets you limit advertisers’ ability to target ads to you based on a device-specific Advertising Identifier. (You can enable this in Settings > Privacy > Advertising.) But that only affects ad-targeting in iOS apps.
None will change the world, but collectively they amount to something quite useful, and they may even prompt millions of people to go buy more Apple devices. Given the volume of iOS devices on the market, the details of the ninth major version of iOS is probably the part of WWDC that will affect consumers the most.
App creators may face new challenges to gaining adoption, and the “platform wars” between iOS and Android could become a tangible pain point for users instead of a vague abstraction debated by tech pundits. The majority of consumers will see the update in late September or early October, but it’s possible to get access to it now as a developer, or in the upcoming public beta program.
But don’t worry, you may not even mind—and what we once knew as apps may, in retrospect, end up looking like a strangely primitive generation in the evolution of mobile computing. Gordon Kelly lays out the options if you absolutely, positively, cannot wait for the new code: Perhaps the biggest surprise, however, is that despite a September release date iPhone and iPad owners can get it now… Yes for the first time Apple has made iOS 9 available in beta form to both developers and everyday users.
A Nieman Lab report noted that Apple’s News app will rely on iAd, an OS-level ad platform that can’t be vanquished or bypassed with ad-block software. The snag is developers are getting instant access while users have to wait until July, but there’s a simple way around this, and without the standard developer charges.
Publishers who see declining mobile ad revenue might be persuaded to sign on with News, where Apple will take a 30 percent cut of ads that iAd sells on behalf of the publisher. In the keynote Apple used the example of an iPhone 6 (unsurprisingly no mention for the heavily leaked iPhone 6S) saying it will get an extra hour of screen time (about a 10% jump).
That’s a cynical take, to be sure, but if mobile ad-blocking improves the user experience and puts a few more dollars on Apple’s pile of cash, Cupertino probably won’t shed many tears over Google’s plight. Proactive and Spotlight integration will only make it easier to invoke the output of an app like Dark Sky (which delivers hyperlocal rain forecasts) without ever having to “open” the app itself. OSX also picked up its yearly spring clean, and as is tradition OS X 10.11 (try saying that really quickly ten times while looking in a mirror) is given a new name.
It also wasn’t an acknowledged problem for developers; the ecosystem was nascent, apps were basic (at best), mobile commerce was non-existent and the perceived usefulness of deep linking was minimal. The problem that deep linking solved in the early years of iOS was mostly mapping web page items to the same item in an app: If I’m reading an article in Pulse/NYT on the web, how do I open that same article in the app? While the underlying code will remain separate, expect the UI and the act of sharing data between devices to become ever more integrated during the year. I’m already a fan and loyal user of Dark Sky’s forecasting app, so the difference between launching the app or invoking an iOS weather report “powered by” Dark Sky are trivial. By 2013-2014, mobile commerce had begun to explode; people were buying real things on their mobile devices to the tune of billions and with it came a need for better tools to drive users through the conversion funnel.
With the SDK, third-party apps will run natively on the Watch and take data directly from those sensors and utilize the Watch’s Digital Crown and processing power, allowing them to run much more smoothly. Health and fitness apps like Runtastic and Nike+ Running will be the obvious beneficiaries of the SDK thanks to their heavy reliance on the watch’s sensors.
Apps were converting users to purchase far better than the mobile web (often many times over), but they had no good way to get users into their apps from traditional marketing and acquisition channels: email and web ads. While that proved to be a challenging business to many service providers, it helped brands to direct their users more intelligently, providing higher conversion and better user experience. Apple’s heavily trailed subscription music service was finally announced through Tim Cook’s use of “One More Thing…” to give it some gravitas. In software engineering, a well-defined shared vernacular is defined by a “standard.” The problem with standards, though, is that many of them do not actually become standard practice, and introduce as much fragmentation as they resolve. The service comes with three major components, a social network for artists to share media with their fans, a 24/7 streaming radio station called Beats 1 (leaving an obvious follow-up to launch Beats 2), and an ‘all you can listen to ‘ streaming music service.
I could define the word “basilafacitarian” as “a person who likes basil a lot,” but unless it enters the common vernacular, it’s useless as a means of communication for me to tell you that I like basil. Eric Rolston, founder of the design studio Argodesign, sees the de-app-ification of mobile software empowering third-party developers hoping to secure a foothold on the platform. “There’s a lot of startups that are features masquerading as companies, and they’ll find a better home in this world,” he says. “For some transactions, it’s ideal. The same is true for an app speaking to another app; unless the URL “myapp://show-item/id123” is mutually agreed upon, there’s no guarantee what the receiving app will do with it. If you can write a perfect API, there’s no longer a need to wrap it up in an app or UI.” Instead of retailing visually attractive “things,” developers might sell (or sell subscriptions to) context-aware “powers” that imbue a mobile device with extra capabilities, like Mario eating a mushroom. SAN FRANCISCO, CA – JUNE 08: Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue speaks during the Apple WWDC 2015 (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images) I’m going to be very interested in how Beats 1 plays out.
But on mobile devices, these perceptions matter. “Consumers don’t think in terms of raw provisioning,” Rolston says. “They think of affordances that they can touch and enjoy.” Once third-party app experiences are unbundled from unique interfaces and smeared across a variety of integrated touch points and OS-level utilities, the once-abstract concept of a “mobile ecosystem” is going to get a lot more concrete. Sure, Apple and Google (not to mention Facebook and Amazon) have always wanted users to go “all in,” but we could easily balance the strengths of one tech superpower against the weaknesses of another. How much time will be focused on major label acts, and how much time on the indie and unsigned acts is a key concern for the industry, although I’ll be interested to see how much user feedback guides the selections.
Farhad Manjoo’s advice in The New York Times in February—Apple hardware, Google services, Amazon media—is practical and all but pain-free to implement. The Register expands on the offering: The internet radio station will offer 24/7 music of various genres operating out of offices in London, New York and Los Angeles.
This will include novel ways to discover deep links for apps that you have, discovering new apps through deep-linkable relevant content and services, and the transfer of more intelligence across the links themselves. Launching Facebook Paper to read the news, or Google Maps to get directions, may soon feel archaic.” If that happens, it won’t be because those app experiences aren’t well-designed.
Apple has promised that songs uploaded by independent artists will be given consideration for broadcast on the service alongside titles from acts signed to record labels. It’ll be because they’re cut off—literally dis-integrated from the seamless, platform-level services that add up to be more than the sum of their merely “good enough” parts. In iOS 8.4 Beta 4 core elements of Apple Music are still missing (no streaming, no Beta radio, no ‘Connect’ artist interaction), but the radically overhauled UI is in place.
All that remains is for Apple to plug in the pieces – something the company is unlikely to do before it can officially start the timer on the free three month trial periods. We’re more like the no-nonsense cartel kingpin in Miami Vice who coldly informs Crockett and Tubbs that “in this business, I do not buy a service.
Strictly speaking there is no location – the iPod devices have been moved away from the top banner and now lurk at the foot of the new Apple Music section: Music, a button primarily dedicated to the upcoming Apple Music service based on Beats Music, includes a small iPod section near the bottom of its tall, scrolling page. Clicking on the “Learn more about iPod” link takes you to the Apple.com/ipod section of the web site, notably including — for now — a link to the similarly under-the-radar Apple TV, which was reportedly slated to receive an update at WWDC up until the last minute. It was a touch display, it was a clickable display, it had new applications, and it was all done in an incredibly short period of time and it blew up on us,” Balsillie said on stage at Toronto’s Empire Club. The stricken Storm had “a 100 percent return rate” for Verizon, a figure that caused the carrier — BlackBerry’s largest customer — to demand $500 million in compensation and to push handsets made by other manufacturers. “That was the time I knew we couldn’t compete on high-end hardware,” Balsillie said. “We had to stick to the low end.” While it’s true the iPhone launch coincided with the rushed development BlackBerry Storm, the real crash happened a few years later. BlackBerry maintained market share long after Apple’s smartphone hit the streets, but Research in Motion (as it was known then) lacked confidence in its core product, overstretched on others, and was simply out-thought by Steve Jobs in the mainstream consumer market.
Not to my mind, but the iPhone did cause companies to react against their own interests chasing after something too elusive, and that doomed BlackBerry.