A C# implementation of App Links, functionally, a port of Bolts
C# HTML Shell Makefile



Rivets is a C# implementation of App Links. It's functionally a port of Bolts, the Java/Obj-C implementation.

Rivets is available on the Xamarin Component Store and NuGet.

What is/are App Links?

App Links are a new open source, cross-platform standard for helping link between Mobile and the Web (and vice-versa).

App Links are a defined set of metadata that can be advertised within html of web pages that specify how to deep link to content inside of a Mobile app.

App Links are about the discovery of ways to link between Mobile and Web.

  • Mobile Deep Linking from the Web - Web pages can advertise special <metadata ... /> tags within a normal web page, which specify how to deep link to content inside of a particular Mobile app.
  • Mobile to Mobile Linking - Mobile apps can resolve meta data from Web links into links for other mobile apps.

How does it work?

Let's say you have a link: http://example.com/products/widget which displays information about a Widget you can buy on the web.

What if you also had a native Mobile app which could display this information? How would you describe how to send users to it? Most platforms have some means of 'deep-linking' inside of an app, but each platform does it a little bit differently.

Using App Links, you can resolve what different mobile platform links are available for a given url. For example, if you resolve the app links for the url mentioned above, you could find that the equivalent deep link url for the iOS app is actually: example://products?id=widget (as is specified by the <metadata ... /> tags right within the web page's html).

So what?

Well, in a closed eco-system of your own apps and websites, this might not sound like such a big deal, but what if you wanted to link to your Facebook or Google+ or other social page from your website? You would have to research the format for deep linking each particular social platform and add these special links to your apps.

Instead, using App Links, you can just resolve the web url for your Facebook page, and instead of sending users of your app to a web view of that page, you could resolve the deep link of your Facebook page and open it right inside the native Facebook app! If the user doesn't have the app installed, you can still fall back to the web page.

App Links Specification

The official documentation of App Links can currently be found here: http://applinks.org/documentation/

To show you a simple example, this might be how you advertise App Links to your various mobile apps from your product page (the one we discussed above):

    <!-- iOS -->
    <meta property="al:ios:url" content="example://products?id=widget" />
    <meta property="al:ios:app_name" content="Example Store" />
    <meta property="al:ios:app_store_id" content="12345" />

    <!-- Android -->
    <meta property="al:android:package" content="com.example" />
    <meta property="al:android:url" content="example://products?id=widget" />
    <meta property="al:android:app_name" content="Example Store" />

    <!-- Windows Phone -->
    <meta property="al:windows_phone:url" content="example://products?id=widget" />
    <meta property="al:windows_phone:app_name" content="Example Store" />
    <meta property="al:windows_phone:app_id" content="a14e93aa-27c7-df11-a844-00237de2db9f  " />

    <!-- Web Fallback -->
    <meta property="al:web:should_fallback" content="true" />
    <meta property="al:web:url" content="http://example.com/products/widget" />

Using Rivets in your Apps

Using Rivets in your app is quite simple. At the most basic level, you can just use the Navigator to automatically resolve App Link metadata from a url and navigate to it:

var result = await AppLinks.Navigator.Navigate ("http://example.com/products/widget");

If you want to understand a bit more about what's going on under the hood, there are actually two steps. The first step is using the default Resolver (In Rivets that would be HttpClientAppLinksResolver to go out and parse <metadata .../> from the given url. If it finds any targets, it will try to navigate to the target which is the best match:

var resolver = new HttpClientAppLinkResolver();
var appLinks = await resolver.ResolveAppLinks ("http://example.com/products/widget");

var navigator = new AppLinkNavigator();
var status = await navigator.Navigate(appLinks);

if (status == NavigationResult.App) {
   // Success! We navigated to another app
} else if (status == NavigationResult.Web) {
   // No app installed or no App found in AppLinks,
   //  so we should fall back to URL instead:
} else {
    // Some other error occurred

Parsing Incoming App Links

On iOS, when your app is launched by a URL, you will want to parse that URL to determine how to navigate to the deep link inside of your app. You can use the AppLinkUrl class to help parse your links:

Don't forget on iOS you need to register the Url Scheme(s) you want your app to listen for in your Info.plist file!

public virtual bool OpenUrl (UIApplication app, NSUrl url, string srcApp, NSObject annotation)
var alUrl = new AppLinkUrl(url.ToString());

var page = alUrl.TargetUrl.AbsolutePath;
var id = alUrl.TargetQueryParameters["id"];

// Navigate to the 'page' and pass the 'id'
if (page == "/products") {
    var productViewController = new ProductViewController {
        ProductId = id
    NavigationController.PushViewController(productViewController, true);

On Android, first of all, we need to register an IntentFilter for our app to be eligible to receive Intents from the url scheme we want to listen for.

Then, in your Activity, you can parse the Intent.Data Uri using the AppLinkUrl class the same way we did in iOS:

[Activity (Label = "Product")]          
[IntentFilter(new [] {Android.Content.Intent.ActionView }, 
    Categories=new [] { Android.Content.Intent.CategoryDefault })]
public class ProductActivity : Activity
    protected override void OnCreate (Bundle bundle)
        base.OnCreate (bundle);

        var id = string.Empty;

        // First, check if we started the task with an extra from our own app
        if (Intent.HasExtra ("PRODUCT_ID")) {
            id = Intent.GetStringExtra ("PRODUCT_ID");
        } else {

            // Parse our AppLinkUrl from the Intent Data Uri
            var alUrl = new Rivets.AppLinkUrl (Intent.Data.ToString ());

            if (alUrl != null && alUrl.TargetQueryParameters.ContainsKey ("id"))
                id = alUrl.TargetQueryParameters ["id"];

        Toast.MakeText (this, "Display Product Id: " + id, ToastLength.Short).Show ();

Referrer Url's and going back to them

Luckily, on Android and Windows Phone, we don't really have to worry about the back state so much. Both of these platforms have back button concepts.

However, on iOS, that's not the case, and we usually want to give the user the chance to go back to where they came from. If we have navigated inside of our app from an App Link that launched us there, we should add some sort of UI for the user to navigate back to whatever launched us into the App Link.

For iOS, when you parse an incoming link, the Referrer property may have a value. If it does, we should obey it and display something to a user that when pressed, will open the Referrer app link to return to that application.

App Links recommends showing the "Touch to Return" banner at the top of the screen on iOS.

Sample Touch to Return Bar

In the Rivets assembly built specifically for iOS, there is a class called RefererViewBar that does not exist in any of the other platform specific libraries. You can use this class to help you display a Touch to Return banner in your app:

public override void ViewDidLoad ()
    base.ViewDidLoad ();

    refererViewBar = new Rivets.RefererViewBar (this);
    refererViewBar.OnClosedRefererOverlay += () => InvokeOnMainThread (() => {

        // Remove the Referer Overlay
        refererViewBar.Remove ();

HTTP Request Headers

One detail which will help with the performance of resolving App Links, is that all clients making web requests in an attempt to resolve App Links, should always send the request header:

Prefer-Html-Meta-Tags: al

If the server implements this feature, it will limit its response to only include the HTML containing the <meta property="al:..." ... /> tags, instead of the normal, full text/html page.

Facebook Index Resolver

To help with the adoption and lower the overhead required to parse AppLinks, Facebook has created their own public index.

Instead of you fetching the HTML content of a page and parsing the AppLink metadata yourself (on a mobile device), you can query the Facebook Index instead.

When you send a request to the Facebook Index, it will first check its cache to see if it has been asked about this content before, and if so, it will quickly returned cached results to you. If it has nothing in its cache, it will go out and parse the HTML for you and return any results it finds.

There are a couple advantages to using Facebook Index to resolve AppLinks:

  1. Speed: Cached results are returned VERY quickly, and even if there are no cached results, Facebook has much better peering to data centers around the world than your user's mobile device, plus downloading and parsing HTML on the server side is going to be a lot quicker than a mobile device.
  2. Lower bandwidth: Facebook returns its results as JSON and therefore the bandwidth usage is much lower than downloading entire HTML pages and parsing them on a mobile device.

You can use the Facebook resolver simply by setting it to be the default app link resolver:

AppLinks.DefaultResolver = new FacebookIndexAppLinkResolver ("YOUR-FB-APP-ID", "YOUR-FB-APP-TOKEN");

NOTE: To use the Facebook Index you must provide an App ID and App Client Token. You can get these by signing up at the Facebook Developer's site, and creating an Application. The App ID will be listed on your Facebook Application's Dashboard. The Client Token comes from the Settings -> Advanced page, under Security (Client Token).

Learn More

You can learn more by visiting http://applinks.org


The Apache License 2.0 applies to all samples in this repository.

Copyright 2014 Xamarin Inc


