Deeplinks as Spam, Spam, Spam, Eggs, and Spam

So I just wrote a story about how deeplinks will be able to kill off a ton of SDK’s and other complexities in mobile app coding. I believe it’s already happening. But then the trolls come along.

Yesterday I’m chatting back and forth on Twitter with some folks, and I see a breaking article. It was about Ahmed Mohamed, the young student in Texas who was arrested and suspended for bringing a homemade clock into school. (The school thought it was a bomb.) Obama, below, had a fantastic response.

The issue was with the Texas news site that had the initial article. That was the only link in the tweet(s) early on. I opened it on my iPhone, where I do much of my Twitter activity. It blinked for second and suddenly the App Store on my phone opened to a specific app. That was weird. Try again. Same thing, different app this time.

And that’s when I realized that the news site had set up some mobile deeplinks for advertisers. But the links were not clickable if I had an interest in that ad, no they auto-fired! I couldn’t even read the article. They had no clue what they were doing with deeplinks, and now suddenly the advertisers were getting 100% of my attention and their site was getting 0%. Well, I did complain on social media so they got *some* attention. :^/

Deeplinks are super powerful and can be really useful and nice. But as SPAM they are positively the worst. This growing pain will have to be addressed for them to truly blossom and take off as a sustainable process.

//Previously published on Medium