"The problem I see with their argument is that they are making this information public."
I love this idea! However, I think that unfortunately this argument doesn't hold up, and wouldn't in court. The information is available via their site, but that does not make it public.
The existence of the request itself (for the handshake) is most of the cost. If a client is on the other side of the world, hundreds of ms. Otherwise if you have servers everywhere, still probably 50-70ms for the handshake.
I will never use eBay again. It took over a month to get a refund for a product that was never shipped. In fact the transaction was somehow canceled by the seller within minutes of it being completed, but it still took a ton of work on my end to get the refund. What a shame
Thank you! This is just Promise.all but for microservices. Every time a large company discovers that its messy infrastructure can be cleaned up a bit by reimplementing a simple programming concept, it's suddenly not just newsworthy but framework worthy
TL;DR you can, but you lose the ability to pass data through install.
Absolutely. The unfortunately side effect is when these users open your app, you won't know where they came from. Using text-me-the-app allows us to link a desktop link click to the same user downloading on mobile and opening the app. You lose the ability to pass data through install, and you lose install attribution. It's a tradeoff--for you, personalizing onboarding, rewarding users or having install attribution may be less important than taking them straight to the App Store.
You can either point desktop users to the App Store on an app-wide basis (https://dashboard.branch.io/#/settings/link) or on a per-link basis using the reserved key $desktop_url (as Abbey pointed out). Let me know if this is unclear.
We are going to automate the uploading of templates within the coming weeks--the goal is to have a library of open-source templates that anyone can use, or contribute to. When you create or edit an existing template, you’ll have the option to make it public or private. Even cooler than that is that we’ll allow you to customize the templates to make use of whatever custom tags that you choose to attach to the links.
If you want to use a custom template now, drop a note to [email protected] and we'll get it uploaded for you.