Universal Link
An https address that iOS hands to a matching app instead of opening a browser, authorised by a file served from your domain.
Updated August 14, 2026
A Universal Link is an ordinary https address that iOS opens inside your app rather than in Safari. There is no special scheme and no separate address to maintain: the same link works for people with the app and for people without it, and nobody sees a browser flash in between.
The permission comes from your domain. iOS fetches /.well-known/apple-app-site-association from the host in the link and reads which App ID, in the form TEAMID.com.company.app, may claim which paths. On a branded redirect domain that file is built and served for you once the app is declared in the domain settings.
Its requirements are unforgiving and cause nearly every failure. The file must return status 200 with no redirect, be served as application/json, and arrive uncompressed — a proxy that gzips it in transit breaks the check invisibly. Apple also caches the file on its own network, so during testing a reinstall is the reliable way to force a re-read. A built-in check reports what the platform would actually see.