Louise Pomeroy
Imagine if the web worked like this: You’re reading a review of a product and you decide you want to buy it. But you can’t click a link that takes you to an Amazon page. Instead, you have to close your browser, open a different browser, go to the top-level page of Amazon.com, then search for the product—if you can even remember what it’s called.
Well, that’s basically how smartphone apps work. Each app is a silo, a self-contained piece of software that, at least until recently, couldn’t coordinate with any of the other apps on your phone. It’s the kind of problem that even on cursory reflection sounds ridiculous. But making apps work together the way the web does—a concept known as deep linking—is still an underground idea. Even in tech circles, too many take it as given that apps just can’t talk to each other.
Tomer Kagan, cofounder and CEO of Quixey, doesn’t think that way. His five-year-old company is using deep linking to make the stuff that happens inside apps as interconnected as the web. Instead of searching for pages, Quixey’s engine hunts for actions—buy, make a reservation, request a ride. Search “Thai food” in the Quixey app, for example, and it will deliver links that go straight to the screen in another app where you can make a restaurant reservation or order ingredients. “How do you do that on Google?” Kagan asks.
To be fair, Google is hard at work on this problem, as are Facebook and Twitter. Each is working on its own version of deep linking, and for good reason. The desktop web has become secondary to mobile apps; computing happens out in the world, not just from your Aeron chair.
Such a transformation in apps won’t be possible, however, until app makers do some fundamental rethinking. Until developers begin building apps with deep links in mind, Quixey and similar startups like URX, Vurb, and Deeplink.me will face limits on how far their work can go. Kagan says that about 30 percent of apps are built with a structure that Quixey can “crawl” in the way Google crawls web pages to build its search index. But he predicts that number will rise quickly, in part because he believes deep linking is the key to creating apps that users turn to again and again. “Downloading an app is not the same as being able to engage somebody,” Kagan says.
What does Kagan’s vision of engagement look like? Buying a movie ticket on Fandango spawns links to nearby restaurants in OpenTable. Opening a workout app offers links to Spotify playlists (an example URX powers today). Any nearby street address that pops up comes with the option to request an Uber that will take you there.
By creating a link structure for actions, deep linking opens up new possibilities for how we interact with our mobile devices. It also creates the prospect of new sources of revenue for app makers. If deep links can be indexed, they can also be monetized, much like Google has used AdWords to turn its index of web links into a torrent of profits. But a deep link may promise a much more precise measure of that most valuable of currencies for advertisers—consumer intent. A keyword search may mean a lot of different things, including a desire to buy something. But clicking a link to take action is much less ambiguous than clicking for information.
“In the future,” Kagan says, “anything you want to do, you should be able to search for.”
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