CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidiphonetextsms
ericka125
ericka125

Reputation: 11

How to text a download link to iPhone or Android Device

We are creating a landing page of sorts for our iPhone/Android app and on this page there will be a link to each of the respective app stores. However, when the user is on a computer, it's a bit cumbersome to access the app stores (particularly Apple's app store). So we would like to add a "send text message to phone" feature like Groupon does on http://www.groupon.com/mobile.

Now, my questions with this are as follows:

A) What sort of code do I need to put in to make this feature work? Is this super intensive or are there free or cheap options available out there to do this for me?

B) How does the code know whether it is an iPhone or Android that it's texting? Groupon took me immediately to the Apple store on it's link. Tried going through the source code on Groupon but it was a bit beyond my grasp.

Thanks for any help!

Upvotes: 0

Views: 838

Answers (1)

Msencenb
Msencenb

Reputation: 5104

A few different things are needed to get this up and running:

  • You should use something like Twilio to programmatically send text messages
  • You need a page on your server (say http://mydomain.com/app_redirect) that sniffs user agents and then redirects the user to either the iOS AppStore or Android store respectively

Once you have those pieces it's fairly simple

  1. Create landing page like groupons
  2. When the user posts their cell phone to your server call Twilio to send out a text message containing the link http://mydomain.com/app_redirect
  3. When user taps the link it will open a webview, which will then redirect to the correct appstore url depending on the device

Upvotes: 1

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