Open links in their respective apps?

It used to be that if I clicked a web link to an NYTimes article from Safari, the article would open in the NYTimes app. At some point, I must have changed this setting, and now, NYTimes links open in Safari.

I can't find anything in Safari or the NYTimes app area of Settings that seems to revert to the old behavior, nor in the settings inside the NYTimes app itself. Is there a way to restore the old behavior of opening links in their respective apps?

Edit: I have NYTimes app installed, I am on iOS 9.3.1, and I am not using private browsing, so some of the typical answers (thanks John Ramos!) aren't helping here.

I have also tried deleting cookies, history, and local data from Safari, and uninstalling and reinstalling the NYTimes app -- all have no effect.

Solution 1:

This feature is called Universal Links. You can read Apple's documentation on this here.

Basically for this to work the developer of the NYTimes website needs to have a file called apple-app-site-association on their server. You can view that file on the NYTimes website here http://nytimes.com/apple-app-site-association. Within the file they can specify which URLs are redirected (on the NYTimes site, any that have a year between 2000 and 2099 immediately after the domain name) and which apps they are redirected to (four NYTimes apps). At a glance the file looks okay on their website, but interestingly it does mean that only links like this http://www.nytimes.com/2016/... will work, while anything else like this for example http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2016/... will not. So right away it is worth noting that they've decided that they don't want all links to the nytimes.com website to open in their apps.

They also need to change a setting within their iOS apps to list which domains it is willing to receive links from. This takes the form of an entitlement called com.apple.developer.associated-domains. Due to the way their app is configured I'm unable to check the plist files within their app to see if they are configured correctly. But in my own testing, this feature seems to work okay. When I go to this article I've randomly picked on DaringFireball and click on the NYTimes link, the NYTimes app automatically launches and opens the article rather than Safari.

What may have happened is that you can tell iOS that you don't want it to pass Universal Links from Safari to the relevant app. You do this by clicking on the link that appears in the top-right corner of the screen when iOS has opened an app with a Universal Link. From that point on iOS will ignore the Universal Link feature for that site. This is fairly non-intuitive, so you might have done this without realising that it disables the Universal Links feature for the site.

There are two methods to re-enable Universal Links for that site. Either long press on a NYTimes link and select "Open in "NYTimes" from the menu, or open the NYTimes website in Safari and click on the "OPEN" link in the Smart App Banner at the top of the site.

Let us know how you get on.

Solution 2:

This seems like a end user question, so I will answer as such. There is a 3rd party app called "Opener" (it's not free, but super cheap) that allows you to open in a supported app through their third party app. You click on the "export" icon along the top navigation of the browser:

Additionally if you came about the URL from a search engine (in Safari) you can open the URL clicking on the "info" icon in the pre-header and if the developer universally linked it will open in their app (irrespective of if it's active or closed).