AddToAny Blog
AddToAny fixes sharing on the mobile web, enabling mobile web-to-app sharing
Sharing links from a mobile web browser to the native apps on your device should be straightforward, and when you click a service’s share button on the mobile web, you expect the respective app to open, but it doesn’t yet. AddToAny is solving the problem by bringing native apps a big step closer to users of the open web.
First up: Twitter & Google+
Coming this week, AddToAny will begin giving mobile device users the option to share a link using official apps instead of mobile websites.
Oftentimes, for example, a Twitter user is logged into the official Twitter app on their device but not signed into twitter.com in their mobile browser. So the user foregoes sharing because logging in feels like a chore on the mobile web. A brand new AddToAny feature fixes this roadblock and further enables link sharing on mobile. It works like a charm, and you’ll see it in action by the end of the week.
Google+ mobile web-to-app sharing works just like it does for Twitter, and will also be available to AddToAny users by the end of the week.
Next up: WhatsApp
All over the world, people know WhatsApp as a favorite messaging service that works between phones. In the United States, people know WhatsApp as that 11-digit acquisition by Facebook, so truly, many of us are just learning how cool a service WhatsApp is over here.
Coolest thing about WhatsApp in our opinion? The app openly accepts message sharing from the web, and where messages are accepted, links are to be shared. Thanks to their excellent foresight with their native app, today we finally welcome WhatsApp to AddToAny’s universal sharing service, and we’re happy to be the first to include them. Enjoy sharing directly to WhatsApp from websites on your iPhone, BlackBerry, Nokia, Symbian, or Windows Phone.
About all those other apps
The web still eagerly awaits Facebook, Skype and dozens of other popular apps to support message passing (and thus shared links) like Twitter, Google+, and WhatsApp do. We implore mobile app developers to consider offering protocols & URI schemes that accept messages & links, particularly if their service is already included (or to be included) in AddToAny.
Like always, expect AddToAny to swiftly enable mobile web-to-app link sharing as soon as a mobile app supports it. We’re already following up with a few other services right now that we hope to mobilize soon.
As for standard SMS, we wish it worked as standardly open as sharing via email works, so we raise the question: Which mobile operating systems will be the first to implement the SMS protocol correctly to allow for an initial message? Until then, consider using Twitter and Google+, and consider WhatsApp!