[alook]

CTO of URX here - thanks for the feedback!

ELI5 "what is a deep link?": mobile deep links mean registering custom URI schemes for your app, and registering a URL dispatcher within your app. The end result is that users can be sent directly to a specific page of content within your app. For example,

  spotify:artist:0X2BH1fck6amBIoJhDVmmJ

...will take you to the in-app version of this experience:

  https://open.spotify.com/artist/0X2BH1fck6amBIoJhDVmmJ

The intuition is that sending users to in-app content is preferable to web content; IMHO, this is especially important for apps that have rich content or have logged-in functionality.

Example of a bad experience for apps that don't use deeplinks: have you ever clicked on a LinkedIn email on your mobile device and landed on a sign-in page in your mobile browser? If they used deeplinks, you're probably already signed into your LinkedIn app and wouldn't need to go digging for your password. This has been a common pain point in people we've talked to.

As a developer, allowing your app to be indexed will make it easier for other developers to send you traffic. Currently, we believe that the limiting factor preventing a "link graph" from existing across apps, is the challenge developers face in discovering how to find (a) which pieces of content are relevant to a page within your app, and (b) how to contruct a deep link URL to send users to those pieces of content.