Applinks Feedback from W3C TAG
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator. The fact that in the majority of use the URL also designates how use of a specific protocol (http), a specific representation of that resource can be retrieved is and extremely useful but sometimes misleading quirk of the web platform.
Applinks is a proposal for enabling app-to-app deep linking through a uniform approach to encoding these links.
While it may be reasonable for companies to adopt this proposal because it gives a good user experience right now, from a policy perspective, we should fix the web and this shouldn’t be necessary for a good user experience.
The problem with Applinks is that is a band-aid solution set up to solve a problem inherent in the "app" ecosystem.
Another problem is that app links are specific to apps that and not extensible. A URL that points to a specific resource (piece of data) could be exploited by numerous applications depending on the configuration of the user's device / OS / browser.
Rather than create a new mechanism for app-to-app linking, the TAG wonders why traditional URLs are not sufficient for most of the use cases.
For example, a URL to a tweet (http://twitter.com/JoelGHodgson/status/459637605303205888) unambiguously points to a specific resource. Now, say you are viewing in your mail reading application an email which has embedded this URL and made the URL actionable (tappable / clickable) to the user. The application that displays this URL to the user could decide to send the user to the browser, could send the user to a native Twitter app, could embed an expanded version of that tweet within the email message itself, or could implement some other user interface as it chooses.
In an example where an app does not have a web presence, similar URLs can still be minted.