Mobile DeepLinking for Android and iOS Native Application

"MobileDeepLinking" How it can save your million Dollar and effort too!!

1. Did you ever navigated from One Native Application to another Native Application without leaving the Application itself? You might not have really virtually felt it but you did. 
2. Have you ever authenticated one Native Mobile  Application to open another Mobile application without exactly launching the Application? Ever used Tinder, authenticating your profile with Facebook?
3. While reading any news,there was a tweet embedded into the Application and when you clicked on that you navigated to twitter?

If the answer to above question is yes, you have been using deep links!!

What are Deep Links:

Deep links are the URI uniform resource identifier that helps you to navigate on another Application with or without leaving the application like fb://profile

They are different from websites which have URL like www.tripsource.com

Deep linking’s for Mobiles are briefly bifurcated into two type's:

• Deferred deep links: The Native Application is not yet installed but deep links invokes you to install the application or opens the mobile browser and then navigated to the deep link URI
• Contextual deep link: The Native Application get’s launched when invoking the URI, remember Tinder Facebook relationship?

How can Deep Linking be useful?

I will be sharing here my real time experience with the best utilization of mobile deep linking in my previous project.

You have a native application for android, iOS, windows and responsive site. Now the requirement comes that we need to implement an MVP for hotels in a Travel Planner. It will require certain effort/reource to implement the MVP on android , iOS and responsive site platform but we don’t have that much time.

Any Solutions??

Now this is when Mobile Deep linking will come to our savior.

Now we will implement the MVP on responsive site and then access the MVP from responsive site in the native of the iOS and Android application.

                                 

Look’s simple,it’s not that simple when you will start testing it ;).

Use Cases for testing Mobile Deep Links

1. UI issues and glitches on native applications Android and iOS
2. Session handling, remember you are booking a Hotel and not 2 cent chocolate.
3. Bit of security testing Authentication token/authorization handling in, may be a tech geek friend of your’s is spying you and tricks you to book hotel in his name by intercepting response.
4. Localization Testing and Internationalization Testing, definitely I won’t like to view the website in any language that I don’t understand and my default language of native application was set to my native place.
5. While accessing Mobile deeplinkings it’s recommended to use proper MobileDeepLinking URLS and iOS/Android libraries for the same.

Here are a few examples of deeplinks for popular apps on iOS: Developer Deeplink – e.g. Purpose Twitter twitter://timeline Opens the Twitter app and links to the user’s timeline Facebook fb://profile Opens the Facebook app and links to the user’s profile Yelp yelp:// Opens the Yelp app (note: this example does not include any routing parameters) Special thanks to TravelPort Digital and BCD Travel Image Source: Google

Let's Goal the "CRASH" with "HOCKEY"

Let's Goal the "CRASH" with "HOCKEY"

Gone are the day’s when we use to take out crash out logs from Monitor.bat file from Android Devices using CatLog and syncing iTunes with the device to take out crash logs from iOS devices.

Now we have more sophisticated product/Application  that can help us in digging into any application crash that are happening in any environment be it Developer Environment, QA Environment, Staging Environment, UAT Environment and the most important one Yes, right the Production Environment.

Most of the tools mentioned are quite simple to implement we just need to integrate the SDK  of these Crash reporting tool in our Mobile application.

The products that I prefer or have used in my experience to take out log’s from mobile application are:

1.       Crashlytics (Fabric): Twitter acquired crashlytics. It is one of the most powerful tool to take out crashlogs for your application, With neat and clean UI once you get a crash it’s shoot a mail to the officially registered Email ID and then we can inspect the issue along with the device and test environment we got the crash on.

It has various other information like Total Crash Count, Crash Graph, Android Device Breakdown Charts, Android Operating System Charts, Free Space Etc.

2.       Hockey: HockeyApp which is owned by Microsoft is a web-based platform that manages its users’

betas and collects live crash reports for iOS, Android, and more apps.User Metrics, Application Distribution and Crash Reporting it does it all.  

There are many other tools that are quite popular for taking out crash logs from Android and iOS devices namely:

•  Crittercism
•  BugSense
• Firebase Crash Reporting
• AppSee

 Disclaimer: Image Source google.com