The Apple iOS platform allows inter-app communication using a technology called Custom URL Schemes. A Custom URL scheme can be used to open a specific app from another app. Try typing the URL âtwitter:â followed by your user name in your Safari browser on the iPhone. Instead of opening a web page, Safari will open the Twitter app on your iPhone (if you have the Twitter app installed). Zwapp uses Custom URL schemes (amongst other things) to help a user detect apps on his device and fill his app profile as soon as he joins Zwapp. The more Custom URL Schemes we have, the better our app detection works. And here lies a weakness of such a process. iOS developers can use Custom URL Schemes to innovate on inter-app communication. User benefit by getting cooler apps with better functionality. At the same time there are an unknown number of apps that use Custom URL Schemes for inter-app communication purposes. And worse, there isnât a single online source available that lists every custom URL scheme that exists. The info is scattered around the web. In an attempt to solve this issue, both for developers and users, we have launched www.onemillionappschemes.com about a week ago (See this ReadWriteWeb post for more info on the launch). This site is to become the largest, online resource for Custom URL Schemes. Since its launch a week ago, 98 people have contributed an amazing 10,795 apps. Our open-source scanner has found 3,123 Custom URL Schemes that are all accesible for the iOS developers community. The shortest Custom URL scheme found is *, used by DropCopy. It seems developers are taking different approaches to Custom URL Schemes. The simplest ones use a referral to the name of the app, 1P for 1PassWord, twitter: for Twitter, etc. etc. But did you know that there are some 20 apps that use "fb" as part of their custom URL scheme? And that Twitter has at least 7 different Custom URL Schemes it can respond too? There are 7 different apps that respond to "fb259197467584", and 18 apps respond to "application". Try the search function yourself and see what Custom URL Schemes have been found so far. For us, this is not the end, merely a start of a very useful online resource for iOS app developers. We call upon iOS developers and mac users to visit the site and contribute the apps you currently have installed to further grow the the online database. We also ask iOS app developers to do the same. Scan your library and it will ensure that your Custom URL's are also available to other iOS developers to innovate with. We hope to provide a simple UI shortly that will help application developers to add more metadata about their own Custom URL Schemes so that they can become even more useful. The scan can be done fast. It doesn't access personal information and lets you upload the data anonymously. The iOS developer's community will be thankful and repay with better apps!10,795 iOS apps submitted, 3,123 schemes, 98 contributors, * and other odd app schemes
