I have been going back and forth with my dev teams today to determine an issue that has come up. It appears that links shortened by bit.ly are not being directed to the proper URL on mobile devices only. This URL http://bit.ly/1aRvnqH will take you to the appropriate place on a desktop computer, but put it into a mobile device browser on your phone and it is broken. The URL that the mobile device renders is a very old link from our old web structure from more than a year ago.
Further it is appending a GA tag for our affiliate program platform as well as a reference code that does not exist in our affiliate program.
My dev guys think it may be something to do with this new deep linking on mobile that bit.ly recently rolled out. When I called bit.ly, they said they've never heard or seen of this before and asked I send an email to their support group which I've done.
Was hoping someone here may have some ideas as well.
Thanks in advance.
Brian
DISCLAIMER: I'm a developer at Bitly
This is a bug caused by our on-going affiliate test.
We're pushing out a fix for this link now and it should be working properly within the next 30 minutes.
If other links stop working for you in the future, please contact us at support#bit.ly or http://support.bitly.com and we'd be happy to look into it.
Related
Edit: Turns out the Uber app was botched - see answer below. Leaving this post as a reference for others.
I noticed that universal links I'm generating don't work reliably - I first thought it was only Android, but I'm also seeing this on iOS now.
Links like this one below just open in the browser when triggering the URL to be processed by the system (I removed the detstination and formatted addresses to get a minimal link, but it's still not working):
https://m.uber.com/ul/?action=setPickup&client_id=MY-CLIENT-ID&pickup[latitude]=47.5045573061129&pickup[longitude]=8.71492590755224
This is a Xamarin app, I'm just using the built-in Device.OpenUri(uri) method, which translates into a native call. That used to work in the past...
Turns out my Uber install got botched. I uninstalled and reinstalled Uber, and now the links are working again. Weird, but I'll just pretend that didn't happen ;)
Just these past 2 days, all of the iOS users have complained that they are hitting a Page not found from their Facebook APP built-in browser to my site. It's been quite stressful for me.
The URLs have Chinese in them, and have always worked until these couple of days (I suppose when the built-in browsers started to work).
Any way to fix this? Thanks!
We had similar issue. In our urls we have hashes (#) when we remove it from shared links it works normally.
Question is why facebook built-in browser doesn't like hashes?
It can be connected with release new version of facebook app on iOS systems which was pushed on 29th August.
Right, I just feel the need to get this off my chest before I explode.
I have made an app using phonegap which actually works very smooth as it's using SVG and very simple but I feel this could be a very addictive little game. the only thing that is letting it down is that I want the user to be able to share their score on Facebook.
Facebook Connect plugin for Phonegap is the worst pile of crap I have ever come across. This is the millionth time I have come back to an Idea, thinking this plugin would have over time (I'm talking years) would have a simple step by step clear set of instructions on how to install but I have NEVER been able to get this working. Before anyone comments on "well why dont you post the errors" theres no point, every time it's a different problem, everyone on the internet cannot get this thing working it's pointless so please, I beg of you can you not post "there is a plugin which can do this easily", it CANT!!
Right, now my rant is over... I have come across this little plugin https://github.com/ccoenraets/OpenFB which, on the face of things does what it says on the tin. My only problem is, (again no clear documentation anywhere on the web for setting up a Facebook app for someone who has never done it before) I dont know what platform to add and what settings to set.
Can anyone state, for a Phonegap application making HTTP requests to the Graph API, what the following should be:
Platform
App Domain
The Platform Basic Settings
If anyone can help it would be very much appreciated
Regards
I am using OpenFB successfully (almost..)
You don't need any special permissions for android application defined in facebook application. Just copy openfb.js library and look at example code.
EDIT: actually I had small erorr in logic which caused me trouble, it wasn't openfb's error.
I've created a web application using asp.net. I customized it form mobile(jQuery Mobile) .
I created an iphone application that has a web view that shows the website.
Is this will be applied by Apple to publish this application???
Regards,
Moayyad
If the only purpose of the app is showing the webview with the website, and it does absolutely nothing else, then it will most likely be rejected. However, if showing the website is just a small part of its functionality, and it does some other useful things as well, then using a webview for displaying your own website is OK, as far as I know.
Note, however, that I/we can only make assumptions and guesses. Nobody except Apple knows what exactly will happen to your app - there are numerous cases when an app was rejected for a feature which another approved app had, so there are inconsistencies in the AppStore approval policy of Apple. Don't expect anything.
I don't think so. They prefer use of HTML5 in webapp. Try to review the Apple guidelines for building web app.
I have made an iPhone friendly version of my site, that I want to direct my users to.
The big question now is how to direct my users to this site. There are a few alternatives:
Redirect the user based on the user agent, e.g. if the user agent sent by the browser contains "iPhone" or android or whatever.
If the user agent matches the above criteria, display a notice on the original site telling the user that an iPhone version is available.
Which one is the most user-friendly? Another dimension to consider is the SEO aspect. How do I show Google that my site is iPhone capable?
I recently found some relevant posts on the Google Webmaster Tools homepage:
Help Google index your mobile site
Running Desktop and mobile versions of your site
phidah above has some good links, but remember: always include a link to view the desktop version. nothing is more frustrating than a limited mobile version when the desktop works just fine on the iPhone. there are exceptions, of course - for example if your desktop is mostly flash :p
This strikes me as more of a user experience question than a programming design decision. I would build either solution depending on what makes sense for your site, and your users. If you do go the redirect route, and the content on both version of the site are the same, I wouldn't worry to much about google. If the content is different, I would make sure both sites are visible to googlebot.
Nearly every site that I visit that has a mobile/iPhone version that just redirects me automatically, and then at the bottom there is a link to go to the full version if I want.
For SEO I don't think this would hurt anything, since web crawlers aren't run on mobile devices.
Check out the links below.
web dev kit
and for css info on detection
css Info
it is some of the better info I have found, hope it helps.
Kirk