Deep-linking intent does not work

Mahoni picture Mahoni · Jul 17, 2014 · Viewed 67.9k times · Source

I followed the insttructions on https://developer.android.com/training/app-indexing/deep-linking.html, but when I want to trigger the intent through adb with:

adb shell am start
           -W -a android.intent.action.BROWSEABLE
           -d "http://example.com/gizmos" com.myapp.android

I just get

Error: Activity not started, unable to resolve Intent { act=android.intent.action.VIEW dat=example://gizmos flg=0x10000000 pkg=com.myapp.android }

<activity
        android:name=".activities.DeepLinkActivity"
        android:label="@string/title_activity_deep_link">
        <meta-data
            android:name="android.app.searchable"
            android:resource="@xml/searchable" />

        <intent-filter>
            <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />

            <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
            <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />

            <data
                android:scheme="http"
                android:host="example.com"
                android:pathPrefix="/gizmos" />
        </intent-filter>
    </activity>

Have I made any obvious mistakes?

Answer

Simas picture Simas · Jul 20, 2014

EDIT:

Ok first make sure that your package is reachable by adb:

adb shell am start -n com.example.simon.test/.activities.MainActivity

Then to accept multiple data tags you need different intent filters (that's the way it worked for me unlike all the other examples I've seen on the net). E.g.:

<intent-filter>
    ...
    <data android:scheme="http"
          android:host="example.com"/>
</intent-filter>
<intent-filter>
    ...
    <data android:scheme="http"
          android:host="example.com"
          android:pathPrefix="/gizmos"/>
</intent-filter>

NOTE that in the above example the pathPrefix starts with a forward slash !

I am not sure why Google's Docs are so misleading or maybe that was for some different version of adb, but the above changes worked perfectly for me. This helped: Source


This is how I made the Chrome browser route specific links to my app:

<activity
    android:name=".activities.DeepLinkActivity"
    android:label="@string/app_name">
    <!-- Accept chrome links -->
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW"/>
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"/>
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE"/>
        <data android:scheme="http"
              android:host="example.com"
            android:pathPrefix="/"/>
    </intent-filter>
    <!-- Accept adb data flag -->
    <intent-filter>
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW"/>
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT"/>
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
        <data android:scheme="http"
              android:host="example.com"/>
    </intent-filter>
</activity>

NOTE The 1st filter works on Google Chrome while the 2nd one works on the ADB.

NOTE2 The app choice menu won't be shown if the link is entered into the browser's address bar. It has to be a <a href="http://example.com"></a> link in side some page.

In my opinion everything here is rather blurry and really not how I expected it all to work. But that's how it works on my device. Hope this helps (and works) for you too.