Deep links don't give a mobile guide

[turt2live]

see matrix-org/conference-bot#27

[jryans]

Hmm, I guess I am forgetting some of the history of why we're skipping the mobile guide for deep links and 3PID invites, but it's clearly an intentional choice as part of #7378.

[benparsons]

Appears that the decision in 2018 was to show a room preview when the page is loaded on mobile web. Now, the question is whether this preview can also include a mobile guide - a banner which says "if you have the element app installed click to open this room in the app".

Options:

1. as we are now, a static preview of a room
2. redirect to mobile app (what happens if the app is not installed? does the browser show an error, or silently fail, sating on the preview page?)
3. have a CTA banner which suggests those with the app installed click to open the room in the app

[nadonomy]

@benparsons @jryans I think the rationale in #7378 to show unstyled/non-responsive rooms in the mobile browser is a little short sighted.

Some things that spring to mind for the right solution would be:

• On iOS, ensure we display a smart app banner with app-argument deep linking
• On Android, is there an equivalent? I found this on first look but looks to be Chrome only.
• Improving responsive styling

In an ideal world we'd have all of the above, but @benparsons I know you're looking for something in the immediate term. For your use case, I wonder if we can shortcut this by using matrix.to links instead of deep links to an element web instance? Might be easier to chat in a room so will ping you somewhere sane.

[jryans]

After chatting with @ara4n today, we're thinking for deep links to rooms generally, matrix.to links with an additional parameter that suggests a specific Element Web deployment (which would need to be added to matrix.to) would be ideal here.

There's a separate problem of 3PID invites. For those, I think it makes sense to complete them in Element Web (which is what already happens), but then have a banner once you're inside (logged in) that nudges you toward the mobile guide.

[jryans]

@bwindels is going to work on support to suggest specific client instances in matrix.to.

I will work on adding some kind of banner to suggest mobile once you are inside.

[jryans]

The mobile guide toast has merged to develop, and can be enabled with mobileGuideToast: true in config.json.

[jryans]

I believe the matrix.to side of this has been resolved by @bwindels, so I believe we're all done here.