I have three buttons on my website, that link to Facebook, Twitter & vk.com pages. I want to open native app, if it is installed on user device. Otherwise, I want URL fallback to be opened.
First of all, I tried to use native app schemes directly with deep-link.js plugin. But, when I tried to open native app URL scheme, when native app was not installed, Safari has shown an error, but opened URL fallback page finally. Default Android browser said that he does not know how to handle such URL scheme:
<a class="btn btn-primary" href="https://www.facebook.com/warpcompany" data-app-ios="fb://profile/838619192839881" data-app-android="fb://page/838619192839881">Facebook</a>Then I tried to use App Links "standard", that that has so much promotion from Facebook. I even tried to use their hosted app links, to make sure I've generated everything right way. It does not work, it always redirect to website fallback. You can easily test it by yourself from https://fb.me/746134728830806
Is it possible to provide deep link on website, that will open native app without errors at least in default os browsers, or fallback silently to URL?
It is still possible, but on newer versions of the Android default browser you have to use intents instead of just trying to open the deep link. For example replace your fb://page/838619192839881 with
intent://page/838619192839881#Intent;scheme=fb;package=com.facebook.katana;end
This will fallback to Google play by default, but you can override the fallback adding a S.browser_fallback_url:
intent://page/838619192839881#Intent;scheme=fb;package=com.facebook.katana;S.browser_fallback_url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F;end
The fallback should be url encoded.
Of course you'll have issues if the user is not on an Android phone or with an old version of the default browser (or strange browser). You can setup a bunch of conditions and replace your HTML with the correct code for each case.