On my CMF Phone 1, I’ve been running e/OS for a while and I really like it. However, I’ve had an issue since day one that’s becoming a deal-breaker in daily use.
Issue: App-to-app deep linking often fails. For example, when a website or app should redirect to another app (banking flows, online identification with the Dutch government app DigiD or for example e-mail redirects to specific other apps), the redirect usually doesn’t open the target app.
What happens:
Bank payment links: sometimes work on the 2nd or 3rd attempt, but only if I fully close the browser and open the same browsertab again.
DigiD links: almost never works.
Other links (a login-redirect from an e-mail, a directmessaged hyperlink to a socialmedia post that should normally redirect from the browser to open in the app etc.): sometimes work after a few attempts but often do not.
This happens both when apps have a button to directly redirect or when they hyperlink to the browser first which then should redirect back to another app (automatically or with a button).
I can often manage with most links not working properly, but because more and more services (health insurance, hospital portals, government services/messages) require logging in via DigiD each time, I need this atleast to work reliably.
Has anyone seen this on e/OS (CMF Phone 1) or knows what might cause deep links/app links to fail and how to fix it?
I’ve already tried setting several different browsers as default (Fennec, Brave, Chrome, e/OS default browser) to see if the issue is browser related but the problems remains the same. I therefore believe it’s an e/OS core issue.
This is very common and one really has to take each case separately. A forum search will find many cases. I’m not sure a broad brush explanation helps but any “secure” app will want extra verification and these checks very often go through some third party link and somewhere within that chain /e/ privacy blockers may interfere. Really you have covered it in your observations. Having Advanced Privacy off during tests may help then it is possible sometimes to identify blocked trackers and consider to allow them.
That sounds like a very logical cause of the problem that I hadn’t considered yet! However, after some testing it seems that it’s not related in this case. I tried both disabling Advanced Privacy for just the app’s in question and also disabled Advanced Privacy completely (including a reboot afterwards just to be sure) but the problems with the app linking remain the same…
Apps which are problem apps for others will almost certainly turn up in a forum Search, top of a forum page or ask about specific apps perhaps for known workarounds.
One idea is to avoid the app, navigate to their https:// page in default Browser > top right 3 dot menu > scroll well down > Add to Home screen.
Note “Add to Home screen” is not always available, often this field is replaced by “Install app” which is clearly quite different.
Transacting via https is generally more privacy friendly than an app.
Thank you but that just gave a shortcut to the browser opening the page.
I have found the solution in the meantime though; within the app info of each app you can set how the app should respond to standard links. The settings switch for this function was already enabled on all the apps, but no links were visible below them. Using the ‘add link’ button however I could manually select the supported links and add them. Afterwards in app linking worked fine.
I suspect this to be a bug since it occurs with every app even though the settings are fine. I’ve now manually added all the links for all the apps that wouldn’t open links and its perfectly working again.
saw that happening (here): not enabled App-Links / deep links (docs).. unsure why those aren’t set active at install time. Looking at logcat while an App installs the first time can maybe tell, some missing component it’s calling to enable them or similar. Applounge is only a store client, the install itself is done by aosp standard parts
Search, top of a forum page or ask about specific apps perhaps for known workarounds.