Apple provides a nice “Smart App Banner” hook for developers to promote their iOS apps from within their web apps. Unfortunately Google doesn’t have anything like this for the Play Store. Now that we have Basecamp for Android, we want to promote it to customers using Basecamp on their phone browsers.
Thanks to GitHub there are a few nice solutions:
These combine both iOS and Google Play designs which we didn’t really need. In the end we rolled our own solution, but I based the banner design on Vitaly Glibin’s Smart App Banner.
I uploaded a working version of the HTML to GitHub. Please feel free to use this design to promote your apps in Google Play. Thanks again to Vitaly’s Smart App Banner for the inspiration.
And if you’re an Android user get the Basecamp app on Google Play!
Michael
on 12 Feb 14I read through the iOS developer page and really like their approach. Even though Play doesn’t give you the same kind of conditional banner as iOS, does it at least allow you to send a hook to the Basecamp app if it’s installed so that the user views the same thing they were seeing on the site?
Jamie
on 13 Feb 14@Michael, the cool thing about the Basecamp Android app is it is smart enough to know if you’re trying to access a Basecamp URL either in email or through the browser.
It’ll then ask if you want to open these links in the Basecamp app. It’s sort of how in Mac OS X (if you use that?) you can set a certain app to always open a specific type of file.
Michael
on 13 Feb 14That is very useful, Jamie. I’d like to see that kind of thing on iOS.
This discussion is closed.