How are referral codes handled today?

Hi,

My customer wants to do the thing where an app store URL is advertised which contains a referral code. When a user follows the link, it should take them to the app store to install the app, and then when the app is installed, it should be able to get access to the referral code in the original URL.

I know such a thing was possible at one time because I remember talking to some of my colleagues about it, but I have never done it myself and whatever my coworkers did 8 years ago in Objective-C probably doesn't work anymore.

Can someone let me know how to do this, or at least, let me know what the correct name for this procedure is so I can look it up? Thanks.

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flarosa
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That general concept is called "deferred deep links". Its something that is offered by a lot of third party services that provide back end support like Adjust, Firebase, etc...

But "Deferred deep link" is the search term you need to be using.

Posted by
Fogmeister
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  • Thanks. It's been frustrating searching for this information because everything I find seems to end up telling me to use some third-party product or service, which is emphatically not what I want. But I'll keep trying.

    —
    flarosa

  • @flarosa were you able to meet your requirements because I'm also trying to implement the deferred deep link the way you described in you question post but haven't got any solution yet to do so without using any third party libraries.

    —
    psingh2109
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If you have a website for the app, you could copy the referral link to the user's clipboard when they visit it and when the user downloads the app, you can check their clipboard for the link. This is the same way firebase does these deep links.

Posted by
josessolmaximo
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