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We are developing an iOS application which has Facebook sharing functionality. Everything works fine except Applinks. We are generating url link “app pages” with specified content (including open graph meta tags) and we want this content to be directly displayed to the user in our iOS application.

The problem is that, although the Facebook iOS app does extract Applinks meta tags from shared links in most cases, when I was investigating it further, I found that Facebook is not able to fully process a link after it has been shared using the iOS Facebook sharing functionality.

When I force Facebook to scrape information from the link again, it is always successful! Nothing has changed, the server served the same content. This has led me to one workaround solution which involves forcing Facebook to update information every time link was shared. We would like to avoid sending repeated requests.

I found several posts with similar problems here on Stackoverflow but none of the solutions work for us. Shared links are publicly available and do not require a user to sign in. Same issues occur with secure or nonsecure access. Links lead to static pages (no javascript). Pages are quite small (less than 2KB).

UPDATED (Added example meta tags)

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
        <head>
                <title>Title</title>
                <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
                <meta property="al:ios:url" content="appscheme://applink/rodjs2kd48">
                <meta property="al:ios:app_store_id" content="123456">
                <meta property="al:ios:app_name" content="AppName">
                <meta property="al:web:url" content="https://example.com/rodjs2kd48">
                <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/rodjs2kd48">
                <meta property="og:url" content="https://example.com/rodjs2kd48">
                <meta property="og:type" content="article">
                <meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">
                <meta property="og:title" content="Title">
                <meta name="twitter:title" content="Title">
                <meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg">
                <meta name="twitter:image" content="http://example.com/image.jpg">
                <meta property="og:description" content="Description">
            <meta name="twitter:description" content="Description">
        </head>
        <body>
                Some content
        </body>
</html>
emilm
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  • I guess I don't fully understand. What do you mean Facebook is not able to "fully" process the link. Which meta tags are you expecting it to scrape that it's not? Can you please post your meta tags as well? Remember, App Links is not a Facebook feature. – taylorcressy Apr 16 '15 at 22:28
  • @taylorcressy Updated, please read again. – emilm Apr 17 '15 at 09:02
  • Can you give a little more detail about what the behavior is when "Facebook is not able to fully process a link"? What do you see from the app? – Ming Li Apr 17 '15 at 16:51
  • If you are able to provide us with the actual url where you're seeing the issue, that might also be helpful. As Ming said, we could use a more detailed description about what your app is receiving/doing, or what Facebook is doing which is preventing it from reaching to your app. – curveorzos Apr 20 '15 at 15:26
  • Did you fix this? I am seeing the same error. Very hard to debug what's happening. – Moss Palmer Sep 21 '15 at 11:02

0 Answers0