Google announces that they will now index iOS app content

The release notes for the new YouTube for iOS 10.38 indicates that the user interface will allow users to search for their favourite content smoothly. Now, Google has announced similar support is coming to Safari, for those on iOS 9. This means that you will be getting the app content in the search results page for Safari in iOS.

Beginning this month, all iOS applications will follow Google’s guidelines in all content based searches. In terms of functionality this would be so much better as far as certain apps are concerned, especially if they require you to log in.

But this feature wasn’t available for Safari users at least till now.

To use the feature, developers need to add Universal Links to their iOS apps and then integrate with Google’s SDK. If you were looking for tickets to a playoff baseball game, results from the StubHub app may replace those from a static web search. 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. Considering that its up to the developers to incorporate the support, don’t be surprised if you find that a few of your apps don’t launch soon after the feature is rolled out as the developers will take their time to add support to their apps.

Google’s iOS client for YouTube is also created to make it a lot easier to get videos uploaded faster by allowing a user to edit them right within the YouTube application for iOS.

If you are using Chrome through iOS & surf on a website such as YouTube or Instagram then it will try launching the app itself instead of simply displaying the mobile version of the website.