To support deep linking and app-links on the web apple expects to find an apple-app-site-association file in root or in .well-known. Details on Apple’s site.
We are using the hosted version of Discourse. How can we provide a static file for iOS to find?
Sure. We have an app that we want to integrate our Discourse community into. When a visitor clicks on a link to that community from Safari (or any other app for that matter) we would like it to open our app and navigate to that link. Apple provides support for associating a domain with an app but it requires publishing a configuration file from that same domain - the apple-app-site-association file. Since the site is hosted by y’all I can’t just shove the static file up on the server…at least I don’t think I can.
AFAIK you can’t use universal links just to open the same webview within another app. If the app isn’t connecting to a back end and rendering out data in a way which enhances the view (think YouTube app over YouTube web UI) it will fail the review process.
Thanks for the insight Stephen. In our case the app will do more than just host the community. We will be integrating the community into a lot of the experience and we’d like to keep it all in within the same app experience.
This is done, there are now two new site settings: app association android and app association ios. The contents for each setting will be served at /.well-known/assetlinks.json and /apple-app-site-association, respectively.