Embedded tweet web intents no longer deep-linking automatically on mobile

[MsPseudolus]

We display embedded tweets, rendered with twttr.widgets.load(), on our website. Recently, tapping on an intent button (“Like,” “Retweet” etc.) of one of these embedded tweets from a mobile device would open the intent action in the Twitter mobile app, if the app is present on the device. However, testing today, it is back to opening it in a new browser window — a far clunkier experience. (We’ve made absolutely no changes to our code.) Seems like it could be related to recent changes, reversion, and subsequent release of changes to the widgets script.

Does anyone know if the auto-deep-linking is due to return soon? If not, has anyone used event listening and link rewriting successfully to deep-link the intents? Or is there anything we should do on our side to get this very nice functionality back? Thanks!

[benward]

Hi! We’ve found there are a lot of variables on the different mobile platforms that affects when deep linking functions (and haven’t found it 100% reliable.) Are you testing in Android or iOS? It’s possible that iOS 11 may have subtly changed behaviour; we’ll need to investigate. Any extra info you can share appreciated.

Ben

[benward]

[MsPseudolus]

Hi! I’m testing on iOS 10.3.3 (iPhone 6S). Here’s what I get today when I try to retweet or like or reply one of the embedded tweets. Is this what I should just expect at this point? I know for sure a couple of months ago, it detected and automatically opened the Twitter app on my phone (because I was delighted to see it finally was doing this by default instead of us having to code it up ourselves).

Thanks!