Google Announces Indexing of iOS App Content

Google announced today that it will display links to iOS apps directly within Google search on Apple’s mobile Safari browser.

In a Google+ post, the Google Developers team has revealed that the app indexing feature, which was originally released for iOS developers back in May, has now been made compatible with HTTP deep link standards for iOS 9. The feature was initially available on Android to offer app content results in Google Search.

To use the feature, developers need to add Universal Links to their iOS apps and then integrate with Google’s SDK.

Spotlight has a similar feature called deep linking, but it eschews Google’s powerful search.

So at the start, don’t be surprised if a few of the websites you visit don’t open into the app that’s installed on your phone. It’s a vicious circle.

Even though the new interface of the YouTube for iOS app is supposed to make things easier for users, it has mostly received bad reviews and an overall rating of two stars.

With this improvement, we will no longer support new integrations on iOS 7 and iOS 8. In the past, this was only available while using Google’s Chrome app or its general Google app. The feature already exists on Android devices, where Chrome is the default mobile browser.