Messenger not appearing in Share Sheet (UIActivityViewController) of branch.io

Question

I am trying to share something via the branch.io share sheet:

let shareText = "Some Share Text"

let linkProperties = BranchLinkProperties()
linkProperties.feature = "Some"
linkProperties.addControlParam("$desktop_url", withValue: desktopURLString)
linkProperties.addControlParam("$android_url", withValue: androidURLString)

let object = BranchUniversalObject(canonicalIdentifier: "some.cannonical.identifier")
object.title = "Some Title"
object.imageUrl = someImageURL
object.contentDescription = "Some Content Description"
object.addMetadataKey("some_id", value: identifier)

object.showShareSheet(with: linkProperties, 
              andShareText: shareText,
                      from: self, 
                completion: completion)

All works great, except that the Facebook Messenger app does not show as option in the share sheet. Neither in the suggested options nor under 'More'. What is needed to achieve that?

I found the following question / answer for the default UIActivityViewController. How does that work with branch.io though? Facebook Messenger not showing up with UIActivityViewController

Answer 1

I dived into the issue once more and I finally found the trouble maker. If I set feature of the branch link properties to a string value containing a space, Messenger disappears in the share sheet. The example:

    let properties = BranchLinkProperties()
    properties.feature = "Share News"   //does not work, messenger does not appear in the share sheet
    //properties.feature = "Share_News" //works, messenger appears in share sheet
    object.showShareSheet(with: properties, andShareText: "Some Share Text", from: viewController, anchor: UIBarButtonItem()) { (activityType, completed) in
        if (completed) {
            print(String(format: "Branch TestBed: Completed sharing to %@", activityType!))
        } else {
            print("Branch TestBed: Link Sharing Cancelled\n")
        }
    }

feature is used as a parameter in the URL in Branch which is then given to the sharing extension. While this, I think, is an encoding issue in Branch, it seems that the Messenger sharing extension is not handling the URL in the same way as other apps. The 'broken url' does work with other sharing extensions. Hope this helps someone else! I will change the name of my feature to something without space for now.