I see a bunch of comments on how useful this is, but I just uninstall applications that have ads that are intrusive. I'd love to get back to the point where I could buy software and pay the developers to make a living. Apparently everyone thinks they need to be Google now (ad supported).
How would this work if the user didn't already have the app it's deeplinking to? Like if an ad in Pandora took me to a page in Hotel Tonight but I didn't have Hotel Tonight installed, then what?<p>Also, seems like a feature that could be added to one of the more popular in-app ad services without too much effort.
Looking around the web site, it's a little hard to figure out what their Android story is. On the one hand, their developer info is about only their iOS library, and explicit references to Android elsewhere are ... not prominent. On the other hand, on Android, apps have been able to "claim" URLs for a while now. (The Twitter, YouTube, and Google Maps apps routinely offer to display URLs on the corresponding web sites, if they're present.)
This is pretty smart, especially with location-specific apps like HotelTonight. I'm assuming an ad-serving app could pass along my location and then display an ad for a hotel room in <i>that city</i>.<p>It's stuff like this that Groupon should be doing/looking at if they want to become relevant again.
I see why this is super useful, but won't this functionality make more sense at the iOS level, as part of their standard API and with full support in the XCode environment? All apps should be able to deep dive into other apps, with certain rules attached.