uLink: user-defined deep links in mobile apps

Abstract

Web deep links are instrumental to many fundamental user experiences, such as navigating from one web page to another, bookmarking a page, or sharing it with others. Such experiences are not possible with individual pages inside mobile apps, since historically mobile apps did not have links equivalent to web deep links. Mobile deep links, introduced in recent years, still lack many important properties of web deep links. Unlike web links, mobile deep links need significant developer effort to be exposed, cover a small number of predefined pages, and are defined statically to navigate to a page for a given link, but not to dynamically generate a link for a given page. We have built uLink, a novel deep linking mechanism that addresses these problems. uLink is implemented as an application library, which transparently tracks data- and UI-event-dependencies of app pages, and encodes the information in links to the pages; when a link is invoked, the information is utilized to recreate the target page quickly and accurately. uLink also employs techniques, based on static and dynamic analysis of the app, that can provide feedback to users about whether a link may break in the future due to, e.g., modifications of external resources such as a file the link depends on. We have implemented uLink on Android, and tested with 30+ apps. Compared to existing mobile deep links, uLink requires minimal developer effort, achieves significantly higher coverage, and can provide accurate user feedback on a broken link.