During Facebook’s F8 developer conference, the company unveiled a new service called App Links that makes it easier to share data between mobile apps and the web.
Designed as an open source service, App Links will allow developers to expose and integrate deep links into their app and into other apps with just a few lines of code. The system is designed to work across platforms, supporting web-based apps, as well as mobile apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone.
In order to achieve the same thing without App Links, developers have to code in each app to which they want to link. While there are some standards, the linking between multiple apps is still everything but easy.
Facebook hopes to change that with this service, which also integrates the Facebook Index API that will serve as the central index of App Links-enabled apps.
To kick off the new offering, Facebook has teamed-up with few of the biggest app developers such as Endomondo, Flixster, Hulu, Pinterest and Spotify. The social network will soon add the capability in its own apps, which for some reason still miss it. Go figure…
[Via: AndroidCentral]