Open Link in App

Ever click on a link to Facebook, Twitter, or anywhere else, and it opens in the browser instead of the native app? Me too. No fun. This app intercepts those links and sends them to their native app.

(See the Play Store listing and blog post announcement.)

To use, after you click on link, select Open Link in App from the chooser dialog box. If you don't see the dialog box on a link that you think should work, go to Settings => Apps => Browser or Chrome => Clear defaults.

I'm not actively working on this right now, but if you're technical, it's pretty straightforward to add a new app, and I happily accept pull requests.

License: this project is placed in the public domain.

Related work

Tasomaniac's Open Link With... is similar, but only works when you explicitly share a URL.

Intrications's Browser Intercept - Share URL lets you share a text URL instead of opening it in a browser.

And others...

Development notes

This app is heavily data-driven. The external apps to integrate with are defined in apps.yaml. generate_manifest.py uses that file at compile time to generate AndroidManifest.xml, and the app reads it at runtime to determine how to handle and redirect intents.

The Python YAML library is PyYAML, grossly hacked as a symlink to App Engine's version in ~/google_appengine/ so that I don't have to check it into the repo. The Java YAML library is SnakeYAML, checked into libs/ as a jar.

Test command line to open URL with ACTION_VIEW intent: adb -d shell am start -d [link]

Lots of apps' AndroidManifest.xml manifest files are in app_manifests/. To extract an app's manifest:

• "Back up" the app with Astro File Manager
• adb pull the apk from /sdcard/backups/apps
• extract AndroidManifest.xml with apktool: apktool decode FILE.apk

For an intent filter to catch taps on links in Chrome for Android, you have to include scheme, host, and either pathPrefix or pathPattern in the intent filter's data element: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17706667

Oddly, this also seems to "unlock" other apps' intent filters for browser link taps too. Goodreads, for example, doesn't normally handle browser link taps, but it does when Open Link in App is installed. Odd.

Unfortunately, pathPattern is a very limited subset of regexp: only . and * are supported. That's not enough for some of the URI pattern matching we need. In these cases, we overspecify a prefix or pattern and do the rest of the filtering at runtime.