Pushing Customers to Your App with the Invisible Powers of Android

Pushing Customers to Your App with the Invisible Powers of Android:
Written by Appsolute Genius’s Graham Hensley
So you’ve finally done it.
You’ve decided your business needs a mobile app to fully engage your customer.
Now your only lingering worry is, “How will I get my loyal web customers to use my application?”
The old adage of, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink,” comes to mind, and to some extent it’s true. Even if your users download your application, you can’t make them use it. This is doubly true if you already have a vibrant web community use to visiting your site through  the browser,  or a passed link.
However, with a little planning and thoughtful design, the Android OS can help direct users to actually use the application.

Users are sometimes given a choice of how to open links.

Maybe you have seen this happen before. You get a text message or email on your phone with a YouTube link. When you click on it, you get a popup asking how you want to view the link, for example either with a web browser or Google’s YouTube app. There is no guarantee that you, as the user, are going to choose the YouTube app, but you were given a very clear opportunity.
So how did Google pull it off? Hidden APIs, private tools sets?
The answer, none of the above! Google, like many other good developers, has leveraged the power of Android ‘intents’ to direct users to their app.
Let’s dig into this. What exactly is an Android intent? Here’s a quote directly from the source:

“Intent messaging is a facility for late run-time binding between components in the same or different applications. The intent itself… is a passive data structure holding an abstract description of an operation to be performed”¹

Basically, when designing Android, Google wanted to create an eco-system in which all apps are on the same footing and can replace any core component. They didn’t want to lock users into using only one kind of text message service or phone dialer. Any developer can write and release their own replacements for almost every device action. Intents allow a generic way for the OS to describe an action and then choose the best application to perform it.
Let’s say you are writing a tiny email app. You want to support opening email attachments, but don’t have thousands of hours to devote to a media gallery or PDF interpreter.
No worries, tired developer. Just create an intent with a reference to your file location and its file type and ask the OS to handle it. Android will check all the installed apps for intents that match your request. When it finds the best match, it will launch and open your file. If there are many apps that support your action, the user will be given a list and asked to choose what they prefer. With this intent system a developer can leverage existing activities and share information between applications.
Now that you understand how the OS can direct the usage of apps using intents, you can put them to use in your own app. You can define intents in your application to best handle requests made to your website URLs. If your website uses well-structured, semantic URLs, you can easily build intents to mirror your site’s basic navigation structure and associate them with activities in your app.
Now users will be prompted to use your app whenever they follow a link from your site. This will drive users into your app and give them the best possible experience with the power of an application.

¹http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/intents/intents-filters.html