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A Deep Linked Facebook Mobile App

Posted by Eric Worrall on in Mobile Development 0 Comment

I recently released RubyApp, a deep linked Facebook App.

RubyApp allows users to send a bouquet of pictures, and a short love message. You can tag the recipient of your message (which prompts the recipient that they have been tagged), make the message public, or both.

Facebook Deep Linking is a feature provided by Facebook to make your mobile app an extension of the Facebook experience. When a user clicks a Facebook news feed message associated with the deep linked app, instead of opening a website, Facebook opens the mobile app, and passes information about the clicked message to the mobile app, so the mobile app can immediately present the media associated with the message.

If the deep linked mobile app is not yet installed, Facebook prompts the user to install the app.

As you can imagine, this is a terrific way of driving viral mobile app installation – people see a Facebook post which interests them, click the post, and painlessly download and install yet another copy of your app. They then use the app to post their own media, which all their friends can see – and so on.

And this is exactly what is happening with RubyApp. A few people tried the app, loved it, and it is now spreading throughout the Facebook community – with no publicity effort from me whatsoever.

What happens if a user is not using an iOS device? For them, there is the RubyApp website – https://apps.facebook.com/ruby__app/.

Why build a deep linked Facebook mobile app, if you already have a Facebook website? The rationale for building a deep linked Facebook mobile app was that I wanted to include a soundtrack with the bouquet of pictures. iPhones do not automatically play sounds presented by websites – so the solution to creating a high quality user experience for iPhone and iPad users was to bypass this limitation, by creating RubyApp.

If you would like to know more about how Facebook deep linking can drive downloads of your app, and what opportunities Facebook deep linking presents to content providers, please contact me at eworrall1@gmail.com.

Apps and Facebook

Posted by Eric Worrall on in Mobile Development 0 Comment

What does “integrating social media” with an app mean? What can it do for you?

The benefit most people think of is publicising your app. Everyone who uses Facebook has seen messages like “Fred has just played Candy Crush”, or messages announcing their new high score on Bejeweled. Such messages can help publicise an app – after all, if all your friends are playing, maybe you should give it a try too.

But apps can do far more than simply announce their presence. For example, consider RubyApp

RubyApp (a simple web only app) makes Facebook the core of its service. Rather than building a complex messaging system, I designed RubyApp to use Facebook messaging to send photos and a message of love to recipients on your Facebook friends list. In this case, Facebook provides powerful high performance messaging infrastructure,a rich list of recipients, and free publicity. Facebook have even arranged a special deal to host RubyApp web pages for free – unless 10’s of thousands of messages are sent every month, the only cost to me is the time I invested in building the app – the rest is free.

Of course you can go even further than this. Say I decide to make RubyApp into a fully featured dating app. The new app could build on Facebook to create new connections between people – give people an opportunity to find new friends in their area, who had registered a profile through my app. They could find each other through RubyApp, then choose to become Facebook friends, but at the same time they could maintain their connection to RubyApp – celebrating their successful match with the RubyApp community, even inviting some people they meet through the app to their wedding.

If RubyApp becomes popular enough, entrepreneurs such as Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg might take an interest. And thats when it gets really interesting.

In summary, if your app could be enhanced by collaboration between users, don’t re-invent the wheel – harness the power of social media, and ask me about how you can leverage the man years of development poured into building the world’s great social networks.