Every social platform gives you one link. Your app is on two stores. That mismatch is the whole problem, and most solutions to it are worse than they look.
What people usually do
Pick a platform. Link to the App Store and accept that Android users are stranded, or vice versa. Common, and quietly expensive — you are writing off a share of your audience.
Alternate. Swap the bio link depending on the campaign. Doubles the management overhead and guarantees the wrong link is live some of the time.
Use a link-in-bio page. One link to a page listing both stores. Solves the constraint, but adds a screen between intent and action. The visitor now taps, reads, identifies their platform, and taps again.
Send to your website. Now they have to find the download section, then pick a store. Two extra steps.
What actually works
A routing link: one URL that detects device and platform server-side, then sends the visitor directly to the correct store. No intermediate page, no choice to make, no wasted tap.
From the visitor's side it is a single tap from your bio to the store listing. From your side it is one link you never have to change.
Why the extra tap matters more than it seems
Nobody abandons a download because of one extra screen — individually. In aggregate, every step in a funnel loses people. That is simply how funnels behave, and it is why the whole discipline of conversion optimisation exists.
The link-in-bio page is a particularly costly step because it arrives after the visitor has already decided to act. They tapped your bio link. Intent is at its maximum. Interrupting exactly there is the worst possible moment.
If your goal is installs, remove it.
When a link-in-bio page is right
To be fair to the format: if you genuinely have multiple destinations — a shop, a newsletter, a latest video, a tour date, and the app — then a hub page is the correct tool. The problem is not the format, it is using it when there is only one real destination.
A reasonable middle ground: keep the hub, but make the app row itself a routing link so that half of the journey is at least direct.
The in-app browser problem
This deserves specific attention because social traffic is where it bites.
Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn open links in their own embedded browsers, not Safari or Chrome. These behave differently:
- Custom URL schemes (
myapp://) are frequently blocked - Redirect handling varies and sometimes breaks
- Query parameters can be stripped
- The same app behaves differently on iOS and Android
A link that works flawlessly when you test it in Safari can fail from inside Instagram — which is precisely where your bio link gets clicked.
Handling this properly means detecting the in-app browser, preferring standard https store URLs, and rendering a visible fallback button when the automatic redirect does not fire. Test from inside the actual apps, not just your phone's browser.
Getting attribution from one link
The usual objection to a single link is that you lose the ability to tell channels apart. You don't, if the link supports source tracking.
Same link, different tagged variants per channel — Instagram bio, TikTok bio, newsletter footer, podcast description — all resolving to the same routing logic while reporting separately. One destination to maintain, full visibility into which surface actually produces installs.
That is usually more measurement than the two-link approach ever gave you, since that one required manually adding two sets of numbers.
How Bridgly handles it
One short link — bridgly.co/yourapp — that routes by device to the App Store, Google Play, or your web fallback, including the in-app browser handling above.
Clicks are tracked by source and channel, with first-class referrer support, so you can run the same link everywhere and still see which channel drove what.
Start free · Read: QR codes for app downloads
The short version
- Social gives you one link; your app has two stores. Route, don't choose.
- Link-in-bio pages add a tap at the moment of highest intent.
- In-app browsers are where naive links fail — test inside them.
- Use per-channel tagging so one link still gives you clean attribution.
Frequently asked questions
- How do I put both iOS and Android links in my bio?
- You do not need to. Use a single routing link that detects the visitor's device and sends them to the right store automatically. It fits the one-link constraint of every social profile and removes the need for the visitor to identify their own platform.
- Is a link-in-bio page better than a direct install link?
- It depends on the goal. A link-in-bio page is right when you have several destinations — shop, newsletter, latest video. If the single goal is app installs, that page is an extra tap between intent and the store, and every extra tap costs conversions.
- Why do links from Instagram sometimes not open the App Store?
- Instagram opens links in its own in-app browser, which handles redirects and custom URL schemes inconsistently. A routing link should detect the in-app browser, use standard https store URLs rather than custom schemes, and show a visible fallback button if the automatic redirect is blocked.
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