When configuring my Facebook app I have enabled “Native Android App” and within that enabled “Configured for Android SSO” and “Android Native Deep Linking”.
My configuration and app code would appear to be correct because if an Android user has my app installed and follows a link to my app on Facebook via THE NATIVE FACEBOOK APP they are immediately directed to my application as expected. Great!
HOWEVER if an Android user who has my app installed DOES NOT have the NATIVE FACEBOOK APP installed and instead browses Facebook via the mobile website at http://m.facebook.com, when they follow a link to my app they are ALWAYS taken to the Play Store.
Is there anyway to solve this as this is a massive drawback as far as I’m concerned and makes the “Native Android App” option impractical and unusable.
Maybe this is the expected behaviour, perhaps Faceboook just assume that Facebook users are always using the native Facebook app?
I work at Facebook and I can help provide some insight in this. First off, this bug report might be of interest to you, because it is currently an issue that we’re tracking on native deep linking not working on some posted URLs on Facebook.
In regards to your issue, there’s a reason why it’s called native deep linking. This feature is for users using the Facebook for Android app to fast-switch to your native app. This feature is strictly for native app -> native app linking. There is simply no way for a webpage on a browser to detect if an app is installed on the device you’re using at the moment. That is why we always fallback to the play store due to technical limitations of the platform.
Let me know if that helps.