Branch Product Updates: May 2017

Can you believe it’s almost Memorial Day weekend? Neither can Branch. All year long our product goals have centered around empowering your mobile marketing and growth efforts; helping you find more users that engage time and time again with your app. From support of the newly released Android Instant Apps Google product to new tools to help your Organic Search efforts, we’re excited to share the latest product updates from Branch in the month of May.  

Android Instant Apps Support

Android Instant Apps is Google’s way of solving the app engagement problem by showing you a fully functioning miniature app in your Android phone’s browser. Imagine this: you receive a text for some last minute tickets to a Warriors playoff game, you click the link to buy, and in Chrome, you pick your seats and purchase.

Branch is proud to announce support for Android Instant Apps. We’ll automatically deep link users to your Instant App experience (right to that Warriors playoff game page!). But the fun doesn’t stop there, as we’ll attribute every single touchpoint, tracking your customer’s’ journey from the initial click, to Instant App, to eventually downloading your main app.

Ready to start linking and tracking users coming into your Instant Apps? Follow along here.

Organic Search

Your app content is at the heart of what Branch helps with. With our commitment to making your app content your own discovery engine, we’ve moved all of our organic search tools into its own tab on the Branch Dashboard.

You now have a centralized mission control for your deep links–your app content–to be exposed to various organic search platforms, like Google’s App Indexing or Apple’s Spotlight Search. With just a few clicks, we’ll expose all your app content automatically.

Organic Search

Keep your eye on this page—we’ll continue to invest in unlocking your app content to different platforms.

Speaking of, one of Branch’s co-founders, Mada, gave a great talk on unlocking your app content everywhere on mobile. Find it here.

React Native 2.0

React Native is quickly becoming the development platform of choice for anyone wanting a powerful cross-platform application written in a single code base. We were thrilled to see the popularity of the platform, as well as the contributions from our community when launching 1.x of our SDK.

We’ve spent the last few months doubling down on development, and have made sure that the next iteration (2.0) conforms to the comforts you’ve come to expect developing in a Node environment. No more cocoapods to manage the Branch SDKs, it’s as simple as doing:

npm install --save [email protected]
react-native link react-native-branch

And that’s it: powerful Branch deep linking available in your React Native projects. Get started here.

Platform Improvements

We’ve spent some time making sure your link creation flows are smoother and bug-free. This includes better UX when uploading links in bulk, as well as improvements to the Quick Link creation flow.

Take a look here.
Well, that does it for May. Stay tuned for June and even more updates to help expand the empire you’re building on mobile!