Deep link
An address that opens a specific screen inside a mobile app instead of the app's home screen or a web page.
Updated August 14, 2026
A deep link points at a place inside an app rather than at a website: a product, a chat, a settings screen. It comes in two shapes — a custom scheme the app registers for itself, such as myapp://product/42, and an ordinary https address the operating system hands to the app when the domain and the app are proven to belong together.
On a short link the deep link is one of three destinations you set per platform, alongside a store address for people without the app and a web fallback for everyone else. That trio is the whole design problem: a link posted in public reaches all three audiences at once, and only one of them can be sent straight into the app.
The failure everybody meets is the in-app browser. A link opened inside a social feed runs in a web view that often keeps every navigation to itself — a custom scheme silently does nothing there. Decide in advance what those visitors get, because that choice is not something the link can force.