Xamarin forms open another app using Rivets component - xamarin

Question

I have to open an app from another app in Xamarin forms. I found the Rivets component which says it can do what i want but I'm not sure what url it refers to.
I looked at http://applinks.org/documentation/ and it says the url I want opened per mobile platform.
My question is, for iOS, what url is it looking for? I thought it was the link to the app in itunes. All that link does is open the app store at the app but doesn't launch the app if it's already installed.

Answer 1

Unless you have control over the Blue Diamond Party app's code or you know that the Blue Diamond Party app has registered one or more custom app links (which are the custom URLs you have read about), you will not be able to open it from your app on iOS. This is the only way to make that work with Rivets. The Blue Diamond Party app would need to register a custom URI of some kind that it would respond to. Then, using Rivets, your app would call that custom URI.
*Edit: To get your app to handle app links from other apps, you can head to the Xamarin's Getting Started Guide (look under the Handling Incoming App Link Navigation heading):
Android does things different than iOS, but for iOS:
Register the custom URI in the Info.plist (not sure if that is the correct XML but it is something like that, check out the link for an image)(the string under CFBundleURLName is just a custom name for your scheme and then you can list multiple schemes in the array under the name):
<key>CFBundleURLTypes</key>
<array>
<dict>
<key>CFBundleURLName</key>
<string>com.bluediamondparty.schemes</string>
<key>CFBundleURLSchemes</key>
<array>
<string>bluediamondparty</string>
</array>
</dict>
</array>
The above XML would register the bluediamondparty as your URI scheme for your app to respond to.
Now, in order for your app to do something when a URI with your custom scheme is run, you override OpenUrl in your AppDelegate (this allows you to put things after your custom URI scheme to, for example, open a specific page or item in your app):
public override bool OpenUrl (UIApplication app, NSUrl url, string srcApp, NSObject annotation) {
var rurl = new Rivets.AppLinkUrl (url.ToString ());
if (rurl.InputUrl.Host.Equals ("play")) {
var gameModeType = rurl.InputQueryParameters ["game_mode_type"];
var c = new ProductViewController (gameModeType, rurl.Referrer);
navController.PushViewController (c, true);
return true;
}
return false;
}
To open the URI from your second app, you might run something like this:
UIApplication.SharedApplication.OpenUrl(new NSUrl("bluediamondparty://play?game_mode_type=survival"));
Finally, you might notice that none of that actually required using the Rivets component... so what does that component actually do for us?! What Rivets actually does is to allow your app to pass in a real URL (such as http://rdio.com/song/12345) and Rivets will go to that page and look for special meta tags that describes how the content on the page is linked to a mobile app that the user might have installed on their device. So on that rdio web page they might have the following meta tag:
<meta property="al:ios:url" content="rdio://song/12345" />
In that meta tag it will list the correct custom URI scheme to attempt to open the Rdio app if the user has it installed and it has registered itself with the custom rdio URI scheme.
The other thing to know is that your app does not have exclusive rights to a URI scheme. So if another app chooses the same URI scheme as you and the user installs both of them, then the last app to be installed will respond to the URI scheme.