AppClips and sms Sharing

The message sharing only works for sharing a link to a website that has Safari Smart App Banner integrated on it.
Links to a webpage cannot just be shared in a message.

Also, please note that Safari Smart App Banner shows the App Clip banner only if the App version with the App Clip is published in the App Store

Hello @liazkam,

opening app clips directly from a message is one of the features that was presented. It works if the smart Banner is defined on your website. I wanted to know if it was possible to test the feature without having to go live, but from your answer, it seems that it is not the case 🙂.

it's too bad that we can only test some of the app clips triggers and not all of them :)

Thank you for your answer.

"The message sharing only works for sharing a link to a website that has Safari Smart App Banner integrated on it.
Links to a webpage cannot just be shared in a message."

This may explain my problem.

In my case, I have an invocation URL (and deep link) such as: https: //mywebsite/thing/<id>

The link should display an App Clip card if iOS 14+, but if iOS 13 or lower, using/clicking the link should display the app in the App Store via a website redirect based on the device User-Agent. This is exactly what happens if the invocation URL is a QR code.

Are you saying the invocation URL sent to iMessage doesn't display the App Clip card because https: //mywebsite/thing/<id> doesn't have meta data to support a Safari Smart App Banner?

@rynning

Exactly. The Messages will show an App Clip as an invocation URL ONLY if the URL is a webpage with Safari Smart App Banner integrated.

The test is simple, if in Safari you see the Smart App Banner with App Clip icon, and an App Clip Card shown when click, you'll see the App Clip referencing when the URL is shared as a link in Messages.

I hoped this clarification was helpful :)

@liazkam

Thanks, that helps, but seems to be an unnecessary requirement at least to me, especially since it's not a requirement for QR codes. Maybe an Apple engineer determined it would eliminate a call to Apple if iMessage could first detect the presence of an app clip while it was already examining other meta-data for the App Banner.

I'm going to have to examine the http request to see if there's any difference between when it comes from Safari vs. iMessage to determine if the redirect to the App Store should happen. Otherwise, this iOS 13/14 "trick" will never work.

So I looked at the user agent when iMessages queries my invocation url for the smart banner and app clip. The good news is that it is significantly different than when iOS Safari loads the same url.

iMessages: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10111) AppleWebKit/601.2.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/9.0.1 Safari/601.2.4 facebookexternalhit/1.1 Facebot Twitterbot/1.0

iOS Safari: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 14_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/14.0 Mobile/15E148 Safari/604.1

Based on this, it's very easy to have an invocation url open the app clip by scanning a QR code or in iMessages for iOS 14+ users, but have the same url redirect iOS 13- users to the app in the App Store.

Thanks again for your help, @liazkam.