We are using ShareKit, an excellent open source framework for integrating social sharing services into iOS apps. We have been seeing lately that sharing to FaceBook triggers a captcha prior to submission almost every time. Needless to say, this experience is not what we want to offer our users.
In addition to that, if the user has keyed in any additional text or edited the post, receiving the captcha will ignore the extra text and only post the text that was pre-filled by the app when it popped the FBConnect dialog.
Has anyone else run across this? Is there some activity that might be causing the captcha to pop up that Facebook might consider a red flag?
As background, this app has been in the app store for almost a year, and this is the first time we're seeing this behavior.
The captcha being required is likely related to the content you're posting - this is especially likely if you're on a shared domain with many other apps or websites - try sharing the individual links and images manually on Facebook.com to see if any throw a captcha there.
The other issue, that the content is partially lost after the captcha sounds like it could be a bug, you should file it at Facebook's API bug tracker at http://bugs.developers.facebook.net with repro instructions
Related
I want to implement deferred deep linking in my iOS app as a means of tracking referrals. When a user of my app wants to refer a friend, I'll generate a URL that has a unique referral code. When the other person receives the link and opens it, I want it to take them to my app's page in the App Store. Then if they install my app, when it first opens, I need a way for it to read the referral code from the original URL.
I've found may pages about deferred deep linking on the web but none that really explain how to do it. Instead, these pages all end up telling you to install some third-party code or use some commercial service. This isn't what I'm after. I want to learn how to do this myself.
There are lots of old pages out there that recommend convoluted and error-prone solutions, like tracking the user's IP address, putting the referral code into the clipboard, or somehow obtaining it from a cookie in a web view. I don't think these are the correct solutions to be using in 2022.
If anyone can recommend the appropriate resource, I'd appreciate it.
If it is the case that Apple simply doesn't want us to do this and doesn't provide any support for it, then I'd like to know that too. I was under the impression that they did, but maybe I'm wrong.
Thanks,
Frank
Apple's Universal Links allow for this (would understand the difference between the typical URL Scheme and Universal Links as threshold). This assumes you're willing to do some lifting server-side along with other hurdles on the iOS side, largely administrative.
A benefit of Universal Links and the server-side work is that you're provided a fallback webpage if a user does not have the app installed. Since the app should open if downloaded, you could typically just redirect to the app store from this URL. In this case, though, before any redirects, you could execute an operation to decode the unique params passed in the URL and persist it in a remote data store. The data encoded needs to be required and verifiably unique during your registration -- email seems ideal.
If that's feasible, your standard registration flow could require email verification with a link to the app as a mandatory entry point (think slack magic link). When the user submits his/her email to verify, you could first check that email against your data store to see if it maps to any previously decoded referrals saved from the flow above. If so, you could generate a unique link for this email to your app with params that will direct the deferred/deep link.
The good news is, I found a solution. I could construct a web page that redirects the user to the app store, but before doing so, copies some text into their clipboard (without telling them or asking them to do anything). Then later if they install my app I can get the text by pasting from the clipboard. I tested this idea and it works.
The bad news is, starting with iOS 16, Apple now asks you for permission to paste. So if you try to do this, your user will launch your app and immediately get promoted with a message asking them to allow a paste from Safari. I expect most users will deny the request and just the fact that they saw it will erode their trust in the app (I know I wouldn't trust an app that tried consume my clipboard without a direct command from me).
I am using branch for deep linking on facebook as well as twitter. Deep linking opens up my app successfully and I am also able to retrieve all the parameters correctly. But at one instance, it stopped working and said developers are working on it and after 2 days started working again after I submitted a ticket to Branch and without me changing anything. But this weird stopping and starting of link is not good for app users. Can someone from Branch help me know the possible cause for the same, as for the live app, this would create a problem?
The reason why you are experiencing this issue is that apps like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat prevent users from opening a third-party app via Universal Links. One way to mitigate this issue is to use forced redirections via URI Schemes on the in-app browser. You can enable forced redirections on Branch links by appending $uri_redirect_mode=2 as a query parameter.
eg:
https://example.app.link/j93str?$uri_redirect_mode=2
If you are still experiencing issues, please write to integrations#branch.io with a video recording of the link redirection behavior and one of our engineers would be able to help you with this.
Branch documentation includes two types of method calls - synchronous and asynchronous calls to method that generates url. If we are using asynchronous call, it would take time to give us the url so need to check for url first before posting it on social sharing and if we are using synchronous call, we get a short url which can be easily shared to social sites. This is what made a difference for me!!
I want my app to create a new Facebook group chat with certain people that opens either on Facebook's site in Safari or in the native Facebook app when the user presses a button. I want Facebook to handle the whole chat and my app only to initiate it somehow in the cleanest and least involved way possible. My app already uses the Facebook SDK to open an active FBSession, so I've already got login credentials.
Looking around online and in Facebook's docs, I can't find anything that suits my needs. The closest thing I found was in this answer containing a list of Facebook app URLs you can connect to that open the Facebook app to certain pages. There's "fb://chat/(initWithUID:)" and "fb://messaging/compose/(initWithUID:)". However, not only is there no explanation on how to use these, but people say that Facebook has changed these URLs (and does not have any documentation on them), so they don't work anymore unless I reverse-engineer new URLs (which could change again). Ugh, so close!
I also found examples on starting chats with the Facebook Chat API, but that involves logging into Facebook using some networking framework then writing my own GUI and model for sending messages, which I am only prepared to do as a last resort. There should be some way to let the Facebook app or website do all that. Does anyone know how I can do this?
I've found something very close, but I still don't see a way to make my app initialize it with the desired group of friends:
The Facebook SDK has a message dialog that can appear for sending messages to friends. This isn't exactly what I wanted but is good enough because it means that all the programming is already done for me by Facebook, and users should be able to see these messages on https://facebook.com and the Facebook apps. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/ios/share#message-dialog
My company has an app (iOS and Android), to which the following scenarios applies. I'm trying to help point my engineers and product team in the right direction.
When one of our users clicks on a content link from one of our emails, or Tweets or Facebook posts, and they're on their mobile device, we prompt the user with a link to download our app. This is similar to what many apps do, including LinkedIn (see i.stack.imgur.com/glSgJ.png).
I imagine this is mildly effective of driving awareness and downloads of a native app, for new users who came in from social media and various web sources. However, it is not helpful at all for a user like me who already has the app!
1) clicking "No Thanks" keeps me on the mobile web (when I want to be in the native app), and
2) clicking "Download the App" takes me to iTunes App Store page for an app I already own.
SUPER ANNOYING. As a result, I have to manually open the app, and search for the content in question. I'm guessing most users don't do this. More importantly, depending on the UI/UX of the app, I may never get there!
Again, I know we are handling mobile web visits in the same way many other companies (including LinkedIn) do, but it seems we are leaving a lot of potential native app use on the table. I want our engineers to build that elusive 3rd option, "Open In App".
Spotify and Rdio have solved this very nicely. Here are deep content links (in the case of these companies, to a specific song) for the two apps respectively:
http://open.spotify.com/track/2SldBUTJSK6xz43i8DZ5r2
http://rd.io/x/QF3NK0JKWmk
If you have a moment, first grab the free version of Rdio or Spotify apps. Then, if you open those links above from an iOS device, you will see how nice the experience is, for existing native app users: Rdio has a nice "Tap to open in Rdio" link (http://i.stack.imgur.com/B7PuE.png), and Spotify's link is even more clear, "I have Spotify" (http://i.stack.imgur.com/Q3IV6.png). Both apps also include a link to download the app, for new app users. More importantly, both apps cookie the user: future visits to links (whether from email, Twitter, Facebook, etc) on mobile web automatically open the app, instead of prompting you to choose each time. SUPER CONVENIENT.
Questions:
1) How do they accomplish this? I'm initially only concerned about iOS (on which I tested this), but this same situation should apply to Android.
2) Why aren't more apps doing this? It doesn't seem like rocket science, so am I missing a key reason why this might be a bad idea? Half of my problem is convincing the use case.
3) Why don't I see discussions about this technique? I've searched a ton for an iOS solution. I come up with a lot of discussion about URL registrations (mainly app-to-app), but no one actually referring to the type of scenario I describe (mobile web prompt to open native app).
It seems that with minimal engineering, app developers could dramatically increase native app use, converting from mobile web. :)
Android supports deep linking. Please refer to
http://developer.android.com/training/app-indexing/deep-linking.html
Tapstream's deferred deep links can send users to specific views within apps (iOS only), even when the app isn't yet installed on their device.
I'm working on an iOS app that allows the user to like a Facebook page within the app. I've implemented this using FacebookLikeView. During the course of testing this functionality, I've liked and unliked the same page multiple times. Unfortunately, this seems to have triggered Facebook's spam detection. Now, when trying to like a page using the like button displayed by FacebookLikeView, the following error is presented: "URL could not be liked because it has been blocked".
Based on reports of the same problem found by searching the web, I've filled out this form to request that Facebook remove the block. However, I've received no response from them. I'm not sure how to proceed. Has anyone else run into this issue and successfully solved it?
With billions of pieces of content being shared on Facebook every month and bad actors constantly targeting the people who use Facebook, preventing spam isn't easy. Just as a community relies on its citizens to report crime, we rely on you to let us know when you encounter spam, which can be anything from a friend request sent by someone you don't know to a message that includes a link to a malicious website.
From : Explaining Facebook Spam Detection
This is no answer and what Donn Lee said is maybe the best answer.
My best guess at this is to send them lot information regarding you testing the app rather than abusing the system. You could try screenshots, contact info and explain what you are testing it for.
Try : Facebook Help Center
Developer Help : Rate Limits, Restrictions and Disables
Try filing a bug on the Facebook Developers Bugreporter.
If it's been a week and the site is still blocked, submit your site on this form.
if it comes down to no other option, there is also unrelated contact info on Facebook Newsroom, including the e-mail address press#fb.com.