Deferred deep link
A deep link whose context survives an app install, so the first launch opens the screen the visitor originally asked for.
Updated August 14, 2026
A deferred deep link solves the gap between a click and an install. Someone without your app taps a link to a specific product, lands in the store, installs, and opens an app that knows nothing about any of it — the browser session and the fresh install are two unrelated worlds. Deferring means holding the click context until that first launch and handing it over then.
The bridge is a short-lived, coarse device fingerprint: platform, major OS version, language, country, screen size, time zone. No address, no advertising identifier. On first launch the app asks whether a matching click happened, and a match returns the original destination and its campaign tags.
Which makes the honesty of the answer the important part. Matching is probabilistic — two identical phones on the same network in the same time zone look the same — so every reply carries a confidence and the attributes it was decided on. The window is hours, not days, the record is handed over exactly once, and low confidence is a hint rather than a fact.