During the Super Bowl over the weekend, Apple introduced their new AppStore.com urls for the iTunes/Mac App store.
Historically Apple have provided each App on the iTunes or Mac App store with a unique URL.
For instance the iTunes url for our revision app is https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/revise-it/id480682657?mt=8. Not that friendly.
The equivalent AppStore.com url is http://www.appstore.com/reviseit.
This is a much more friendly and readable url. Great for developers wishing to promote their apps.
The urls themselves are auto generated by Apple and it is possible that a url will point to more than one app who have similar names. In that case a user will be presented with a list of apps to choose from.
According to the documentation, Apple supply three types of urls
Company Name
- iOS: http://appstore.com/<companyname> for example, http://appstore.com/amsysplc
- Mac: http://appstore.com/mac/<companyname> for example, http://appstore.com/mac/amsysplc
App Name
- iOS: http://appstore.com/<appname> for example, http://appstore.com/reviseit
- Mac: http://appstore.com/mac/<appname> for example, http://appstore.com/mac/reviseit
App by Company
- iOS: http://appstore.com/<companyname>/<appname> for example, http://appstore.com/amsysplc/reviseit
- Mac: http://appstore.com/mac/<companyname>/<appname> for example, http://appstore.com/mac/amsysplc/reviseit
When creating an App Store Short Link, the following rules to the company or app name are applied:
- Remove all whitespace
- Convert all characters to lower-case
- Remove all copyright (©), trademark (™) and registered mark (®) symbols
- Replace ampersands (“&”) with “and”
- Remove most punctuation (See Listing 2 for the set)
- Replace accented and other “decorated” characters (ü, å, etc.) with their elemental character (u, a, etc.)
- Leave all other characters as-is.