Linking to an iphone App

Question

I have an App i am developing. Part of the functionality allows the user to send an e-mail to friends from the App.

In this E-mail i would like to have a link to my App in the iTunes store.

I was wondering if it is possible to do this before your app has been submitted?

Or would i have to send an update as soon as the app is available and has a URL?

Any help would be appreciated

Answer 1

The best way of going about this would be to have your own canonical URL for your app on a domain of your own which redirects to the app store. This could be something like 'http://www.mygreatapp.com/download'. You could set this up with a basic Apache directive or a simple META redirect in an HTML page.

Create a basic holding page at the above URL ('coming soon' etc.) and once the app is approved, it will take only a minute or two to update the page to redirect to the iTunes URL.

Bonus side-effect: you now have a canonical URL which is much easier to type and pass on to others compared to the long iTunes URL.

Answer 2

Actually, you can do this. You can get your Application ID by clicking on "App Details" in iTunes Connect, even if the application hasn't been approved yet.

the iTunes link generator makes URLs like

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=320463484&mt=8&uo=6

so you just have to substitute your ID in.

This should work if you just want your app to be able to link to itself; I wanted the "Lite" version of my app to link to the "Deluxe" version, and the link is correct but not useable because one has been approved and the other hasn't!

Answer 3

I doubt you can do this. You should update the URL somehow after it will be available on iTunes.
But.. the trick could be to extract the URL from external internet resource. Say, from the file, that is hosted somewhere by you.

Answer 4

Edit: iTunes Connect now gives you a permalink to your app on the App Store when you add it to your list of applications. You don't have to submit your binary, just put the app in the system.