Cordova Deep Link Sample

This is a sample app that can be started by clicking a specific link in the browser on an Android device.

Server side

You should host some web page that has a link pointing to some location you want to handle by the app. You also should provide a way for the Android OS to verify you own the site. To do this, you should put .well-known/assetlinks.json file with the app signature on the same domain. Official documentation on verification available here. You need to get your app signing certificate fingerprint by

keytool -list -v -keystore my-release-key.keystore

and put it into the following JSON:

[{
  "relation": ["delegate_permission/common.handle_all_urls"],
  "target": {
    "namespace": "android_app",
    "package_name": "your-package-name",
    "sha256_cert_fingerprints": ["your-fingerprint"]
  }
}]

Sample files hosted on the server you can find in the server folder. You can use the following test page for this app: sandbox.sprinting.io/test.html.

It is important to sign both debug and release versions with the same certificate to test links. By default, for debug, the certificate is unique for each environment. So please use

cordova run android --buildConfig build.json

For the production environment, it is better do not to have a keystore password in the build configuration, so

cordova run android --buildConfig build.json --password ...

Application configuration

First, you should create an intent filter handling deep links in your application manifest. You can take a look at the offical documentation before doing this. You need an entry in the Cordova config creating an additional intent filter in the Android manifest:

<platform name="android">
  <config-file target="AndroidManifest.xml" parent="/manifest/application/activity[@android:name='MainActivity']">
    <intent-filter android:autoVerify="true">
      ...

Now you have to react on deep link Intent. To do this, you should have a dependency on the plugin allowing you to handle intents. In this sample snakelizzard/cordova-plugin-intent is used. See www/js/index.js for reference.

window.plugins.intentShim.onIntent(intent => doSomething(intent));
window.plugins.intentShim.getIntent(intent => doSomething(intent),
        () => console.log('Error getting launch intent'));

The first line will handle the case when the intent is delivered for running the application. The second line is for the case when the application is initially started with deep link intent. You can check intent.action to be android.intent.action.VIEW for links and intent.data should hold the URL for this case.

Testing without server

You can just do

adb shell am start -W -a android.intent.action.VIEW -d \"your-url\" your-app-package

to send test intent.