Universal links opening all paths instead of only matching ones

Hi John,

At least as of Beta 4 (upgrading to 5 currently), I wasn't seeing this behavior. I have paths: [ "/foo/*" ] as an example for my site, and see redirections *not* occurring for the root (/index.html), but occuring as expected for /foo/bar for example.

Note, however, that paths are not regexes. You can only do /prefix/*, nothing fancier than that.

There is an example on this page of "/foo/*/bar/201?/mypage" which makes me think my paths are legal. However I have noticed now that removing the entire applinks section does stop any link from being opened in the app but with the paths it opens everything.

Interesting, I wonder if this behavior has changed. The keynote for this made no mention of such a feature, and went as far as pointing out "path prefixes." I thought I had read that regexes weren't supported, but perhaps I was wrong. So, for your example specifically, I'm not sure what the expected behavior would be.

/??/*/dir/*

Appears to me like / [Optional] [Optional again?] followed by /*/dir/*, so anything with dir in the path should match. However, I'm not sure if the first two ?s are valid like that, which may be your problem.

I don't think it is regex, it is the traditional path wildcards. ? means any one character, * means 1 or more characters. So I think /??/*/dir/* would be /[any folder with exactly 2 chars]/[any folder]/dir/[anything].

Ah, you are right. Surprising choice of syntax, imo. Have you tried any other variations of the path, like hardcoding a specifc subpath to see if that made the matching more specific? I think I've seen someone who also reported issues with *everything* deep linking when they had another handoff service enabled, but I could be wrong again 😉

I just tried with a single path a la "/somepage" and it still opens everything 😟

In that case, you may want to consider logging a bug with Apple (bugreport.apple.com), as this doesn't sound like expected behavior to me. With the newer beta content, they've been more responsive than they typically are to released content bugs.

I had this exact same issue until I started using the new apple-site-association format.

Make sure you don't get the following warning:

"An apple-app-site-association file was found but it is using the old format."

when using the App Search API Validation Tool (https://search.developer.apple.com/appsearch-validation-tool/).

Hope it helps!