Detour
The deferred deep linking tool built for mobile developers
144 followers
The deferred deep linking tool built for mobile developers
144 followers
Detour is the deferred deep linking tool built for developers, not marketers. It’s an open-source alternative to Branch or AppsFlyer – lighter and simpler. Free to start, easy to integrate, and built for teams who want full control over their linking infrastructure. Handle invitations, referrals, product/user links to create a seamless web-to-mobile flow and analyze traffic.
There’s a common annoying scenario in mobile apps...you click a link to see a specific product, but you don't have the app installed. You go to the App Store, download it, and open it—only to land on the generic home screen. The content you wanted is gone.
Deferred deep links fix this "broken bridge." They remember exactly where the user was headed before the install, teleporting them to the right screen the moment they first open the app.
Hi Product Hunt! 👋 I’m one of the creators of Detour by Software Mansion.
Deep linking shouldn't be a headache, but after years of building mobile apps, we realized it still is. Most existing tools are built for marketers, carry heavy price tags, or are simply painful to integrate.
We finally decided to build the tool we wish we had: Detour.
Detour is a lightweight, developer-first deep linking library designed to stay out of your way while doing the heavy lifting.
A few highlights:
Clean API, minimal setup – works the way you'd expect
Smart routing with deferred deep links – gets users to the right screen, even across installs
Flexible, open-source and privacy-friendly
We’re just getting started. Ad provider integrations, self-hosting capabilities, and SSO are all coming soon.
Detour is currently free while we're in these early stages. As we roll out more features, we plan to keep things simple and significantly cheaper than the "big" alternatives:
Free Tier: For small start-ups and side projects.
Starter ($20/mo): Custom domains and dedicated support.
Business (~$100/mo): High limits for growing companies.
Enterprise: For those needing SSO, priority support, custom features or self-hosting for maximum security.
Our goal is to keep Detour accessible for everyone. Since we’re still early, we aren't pushing pricing aggressively
We’d love to hear what you think!
Wow!
I had struggled with this alot. Before react navigation v7. It was a nightmare. I set it up for my last company app after upgrading to v7. Now expo router API is good for business logic layer. But centralising deferred deep linking with all the analytics was a costly option with Branch. How is it different than https://dub.co/ , other than being OSS, which is very cool!
@agrit_tiwari Overall, we're aiming for a much better integration flow, flexibility developer-side and affordability. Regarding the differences:
- If I recall correctly, dub required pro version for some of the basic customization features, which we're planning to provide for free
- In general, we're planning a lower price range for detour
- We're less marketing-oriented, we will be trying to balance this bloated part in such a way that developers don't need to care too much about that
- We want it to be much easier to integrate in multiple scenarios, especially in react-native. You can check the integration examples here
Recently, we needed to add deferred deep linking in our Expo app, and I spent quite some time searching on GPT and google to find a good solution.
At first, I came across branch.io, but it offers many additional features, while we only needed deferred deep linking.
So I kept looking for a simpler solution focused on just deferred links, and that's when I found Detour.
Based on the doc, the implementation was straightforward, and it worked perfectly on both Android and iOS.
On top of that, its free and open source, which makes it a great option for deferred deep linking.
Thank you to the Software Mantion team! I'm also a fan of your other libraries, like Reanimated. Thanks for making the React Native community stronger💪
Expo
congrats on the launch! looking forward to giving this a try :)