Mobile apps - Tracking links generated by app player

Question

I have a game application and I want to add the option for players to invite their friends to the game and be rewarded for that. The flow seems really straight forward for me except one section of it. A player (lets call him James) wants to invite another player (lets call her Tina), James' request generates a unique link that Tina can click (put aside the sharing method for a moment) and when Tina clicks it she is referred to the app store to download the game. Here comes my problem, I can store the data on James' request in the database, for instance, creating a special request hash that will be attached to the link as a parameter, but now Tina clicks on the link, which opens my own webpage that will eventually forward her to the app store for the download page, but once she is on my page, how can I create a correlation between her and him for later usage so I can reward him for inviting her? I mean, when she opens the game, I can't pass anything to the app because she can decide when and where from to open my app.

I hope the problem is clear enough but to summarize it: I can't seem to find a way to save data on a player that have yet to install my application but is on my webpage.

Any help would be welcome.

Answer 1

Yes it is possible and I have done this using Firebase Dynamic links .

From Firebase docs:

When a user opens one of your Dynamic Links, if your app isn't yet installed, the user is sent to the Play Store or App Store to install your app (unless you specify otherwise), and your app opens. You can then retrieve the link that was passed to your app and handle the deep link as appropriate for your app.

There was one more alternative called Branch which is also getting the job done similarly by device fingerprinting.

Read more: https://blog.branch.io/how-to-use-dynamic-links-to-drive-better-user-experiences-at-scale/