I’m trying to find an android mastodon app that can handle links from outside the app and open them in the app. Tusky is not going to implement this feature request and I haven’t seen anything from the official app nor Fedilab.

It really feels like not being able to open mastodon links in an app is what’s holding me back from using Mastodon more. I don’t always find Mastodon content from within and is like to be able to interact with them more.

  • AdaEnglish
    9•10 months ago

    There is no easy way to implement it at the app level, because apps have no way of knowing whether any given link is a mastodon link or not

    • EpheraEnglish
      3•10 months ago

      Yeah, you would have to maintain a list of all Mastodon instance domain names, and Google requires this list to be baked in at build time of the app, so updating it requires updating the whole app and there’s no way to dynamically detect that this link is a Mastodon link.

      This isn’t to say that it can’t be done, Newpipe does this for Invidious/Piped instances, but yeah, it’s a good bit of work…

      • @ripcordEnglish
        1•10 months ago

        It can’t query this info externally occasionally…?

        • EpheraEnglish
          2•10 months ago

          What I could theoretically imagine, is that an extension could give it a custom URL scheme, like mastodon://mastodon.social/v1/..., and then the various Mastodon apps could register an intent/open handler for that. But yeah, again, quite a bit of effort.

          Alternatively, the apps could offer a secondary Share-action, which tries to open the link instead of creating a post from it…