Android app launch w/anchor tag on Chrome 53+

[Christopher Uhl]

Greetings,

I’m attempting to get an Android app (installed via Google Play) to launch in response to clicking a link in Chrome. It seems that ChromeOS evaluates the URL in a link’s href attribute for apps with matching ‘supported links’, and will offer the choice to either use Chrome or the matching app when the link is clicked. I’ve observed this working when the URL to be navigated to is different from the URL that served the page that contains the link.

The behavior seems different when the link’s href URL matches the URL that served the page the link is placed on, however. In that case the navigation proceeds through Chrome unconditionally.

Is this behavior documented anywhere? Is there any way around it?