Launching iOS app using app id?

Question

With iOS 5 and vice versa, to run one iOS application from another iOS application, you used openUrl along with a custom scheme / protocol. (It was not possible to start the application without a special scheme, and if there were two applications with the same scheme / protocol, it was unclear which application would be launched)

With iOS 6, you can launch the application from safari (via the smart application banner) and from Siri. Smart application banners will be launched through the application identifier; it is not known how the launch through the Siri occurs.

Is "launching the application through the id application" a public / supported api call ? Can this be used to run one custom application from another user application?

(If so, this may decide to launch an existing application that does not have a support / protocol scheme + solve the problem with two applications with the same scheme)

Answer 1

The process is called: Smart App Banner.

David Smith wrote a very tiring post about them. http://david-smith.org/blog/2012/09/20/implementing-smart-app-banners/

Basically, you just add this meta tag to the page of your website (where ####### is your application identifier):

<meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=#########"/></code> 

If you want to transfer more calls to the call, let's say do something more specific in your application that just opens its use:

 <meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=#########, foo=xxxxxx&bar=yyyyyyy"/> 

Then, in you, the application delegate processes the callback URL:

 -(BOOL)application:(UIApplication*)application openURL:(NSURL*)url sourceApplication:(NSString*)sourceApplication annotation:(id)annotation