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The Best Alternative to Firebase Dynamic Links

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App Masters12:59Open on YouTube
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The bottom line

Airbridge DeepLinks is the replacement for Firebase Dynamic Links, which Google shuts down on August 25, 2025. Switching now keeps every user journey intact and lets you track each campaign from one dashboard.

Key takeaways

  • Firebase Dynamic Links shuts down on August 25, 2025, so existing links need a new home. 1:48
    • Large brands such as Temu likely have many deep links, so the move should start early.
  • A deep link sends each user to the exact content they were promised, even through an app install. 4:51
    • A user without the app goes to the store, installs it, and lands on the same shoe they saw on the web.
    • E-commerce brands want this because app users are more loyal than web visitors.
  • Airbridge links are faster because they skip interstitial pages. 5:33
    • In a Facebook Messenger test, Airbridge took under 3 seconds and Firebase took 6.
    • In an Instagram DM test, Airbridge took half the time Firebase did.
  • Each link carries campaign tags, so every channel and influencer can be tracked. 8:50
    • The link builder takes source, medium, campaign and creative, like UTM tags, and each link also gets a QR code.
    • Events such as purchases and registrations can be pulled into the same dashboard.
  • Migration from Firebase needs no code and no developer. 11:00
    • Export the Firebase links, map their parameters to Airbridge tracking, then paste them into the link generator.
    • The plan starts at $200 a month, which is small for teams that already rely on deep links.

It is one link that you can use to send users to anywhere you want and also manage their user experience.

Steve P Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 What a deep link does

A deep link sends a user to a chosen place and shapes what they see on arrival.

  • One link can carry a user from a website or ad into the right spot in an app. 0:37
    • A referral can show the sender's picture and the exact book they recommended.
    • In a Temu ad on Instagram, a prompt to get the item in the app opens the app and lands on that product.
    • The user signs in and arrives on the same item they saw in the ad.
    • The user never has to search again, which is why it feels seamless.

2:01 Where deep links are used

Deep links work in every channel, and each channel can be tracked separately.

  • Blogs, social posts, email and partner sites can all carry deep links. 2:09
    • A banner on an SEO blog post can drive app downloads.
    • Link-in-bio links on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and Facebook show which platform performs best.
    • One client uses deep links in email to promote a lifetime offer and sends users straight into it.
    • That client sees the revenue and sales in a single Airbridge dashboard.

4:18 Deep linking for e-commerce

E-commerce brands use deep links to pull web shoppers into the app.

  • An offer such as 15% off gives shoppers a reason to move from the web to the app. 4:25
    • Shoppers who already have the app skip the store and open it directly.
    • Many e-commerce brands send users to the web first because it is easier.
    • Temu works hard to move users from the web into its app.
    • Web2app is another route to the same goal.
  • Airbridge also won the Facebook post test. 6:09
    • The links are compatible with the other platforms too.
    • Airbridge was ahead in all three tests shown, across Messenger, a Facebook post and Instagram DM.
    • The comparison is against Firebase links, which add interstitial pages.

6:30 QR codes and the reporting dashboard

Each link works offline and online, and the dashboard shows which channel earned every install.

  • QR codes take deep links into offline marketing. 6:32
    • Flyers and cards can carry the code.
    • Stores that partner with the app can display it.
    • Some apps print the QR code on receipts that come with a physical product.
    • The speaker says Airbridge is the only tool with this feature, and that it hasn't worked for some other developers.
  • Reports show installs by channel for each unique link. 7:21
    • Influencer and podcast campaigns each get their own link.
    • Links can use a custom brand domain.
    • The report shown is a sample from a dummy account.
    • The brand domain lets deep links look like part of the company's own site, which suits bigger companies.

8:50 Building a link and migrating

One form sets each link's routing and fallbacks, and a template moves old Firebase links over.

  • The link form sets where each platform sends the user. 9:21
    • Android can go to the default store listing, a custom listing or a web URL.
    • iOS can use custom product pages for each influencer.
    • The SDK is installed first. The demo uses the ATMs app, which promotes app deals on social media.
    • A website URL serves as the backup, and the short link name is custom.
    • Social settings such as an image and a description can be added before sharing the link with the influencer.
  • The FDL migration template converts old links without code or a developer. 11:00
    • The converted links go into campaigns as they are.
    • Users see no broken journeys.
    • The speaker says it is just as good as FDL but maybe even better.
    • Tracking installs and events this way is a cheaper route to affiliate and influencer marketing.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young, Founder of App Masters. Deep links send users from an ad, email, blog or influencer post straight to the right screen in an app, and Firebase Dynamic Links shut down on August 25th 2025, so teams need a replacement. The episode walks through setting up Airbridge deep links and migrating Firebase links with no code, with demos showing Airbridge opening the app in under 3 seconds versus 6 seconds for Firebase.

Lessons that draw on this:

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Transcript333 lines
0:00

coming up I'm going to share with you a simple tool that you can use to create one simple link that can take your users to wherever you want no matter what device they're on stay tuned what is up appnation it is Steve p young founder ofms. and we're going to talk all about deep links yes if you're not familiar with the Deep link it is one link that you can use to send users to anywhere you want and also manage their user experience so for example if I refer you to a product and you download this app you might be able to see my picture you might see Steve recommended this particular book and have you land or if you want to run ads like Teemu here's an ad on Instagram they're sending users to their website and they said hey you can actually get this in the app app take him to the app boom right there I'm in the app I get to sign in right here and it's Landing me directly to the particular product which

1:11

you know obviously I might want some backlights back there too so this is what a deep link is all about it's taking a user from your website I can get into the app I download the app once I download the app I'm landed perfectly to where I belong it's a seamless seamless user experience that's what deep linking is all about and we're going to share with you the simplest way to get started right now all right if you guys aren't aware well the Firebase Dynamic links the Deep links are going away and airbridge has a great solution for you if you're not familiar if you've been using Firebase Dynamic links it's going away Google is going to shut it down August 25th 2025 so you got a bit of time but you want to start now because if you're a big company like teu you probably have a lot of deep links now this leads me to how you can use deep links now they're very powerful I know a lot of times we think about deep

2:06

links and we're like oh we take a like if I'm sharing a product you want to give a personalized experience with the person that shared it or if you're using influencer marketing you want to give a personal experience right and you want to track all that stuff but here are other ways you can actually use it on your own blog post let's say you've got a banner on your blog which I recommend you do right if you're writing SEO friendly blog post and you're using SEO to drive downloads it does work and then if you have social media posts and you want to say like Link in BIO you can do that as well so you can set up Instagram Tik Tok LinkedIn Facebook all that stuff and you can track Which social media platforms are the best the linkoln bio influencer marketing affiliate marketing we talked about that already now here's the other thing email marketing that's going to be huge I know one of our clients that does a lot of email

2:54

marketing they always use these deep links in their product if if you're promoting like a lifetime offer for example and you're taking users into the app then you can deep link them straight into that offer and then track it and so within airbridge dashboard you can see the revenues the sales of all that and that's what one of our clients does really well so they have one dashboard that they can track everything into all right and obviously everything else here partner websites duh now I'm going to go fast on this because I really want to show off the tool and rather than trying to sell you and have a long leadup to airbridges a solution I'm going to go through this really quick so it's seamless right it's that user experience that seamless stress-free migration so if you're on Firebase easy easy way to migrate to airbridge from Firebase and then the best value look it's only $200 a month and you can get started so if

3:48

you're in India out there this is pretty affordable out there and if you're using deep links you probably can afford $200 let's face it Indies probably aren't using deep links so if you are using deep links $200 is not a whole lot of investment to give your end users the experience that they want now airbridge look this is why I'm skipping past they've done some tremendous work with some amazing companies they've been a longtime partner of app Masters and a longtime sponsor of the channel as well so they've got some great Partnerships now here's what it is it's seamless deep linking which you know for most deep linking Solutions you better be seamless otherwise why would I use you here's what deep linking does and I want to hold on this slide a little bit so just like I showed you with the teu example you have an ad and you want to take users to the app let's say you're an e-commerce brand now e-commerce Brands

4:37

you want to take them to the app because that becomes a more loyal user than somebody just on the web so you if you can get them into the app and give them 15% off if they don't have the app what deep linking will do is take them to the app stores have them install the app and seamlessly show off the same shoe or the same product that they saw on the web now if they have the app good on you Advertiser but when they hit get the app it'll take them directly into the app open the app and all that stuff here too if you're using web2 App you might want to do something like this as well if you're not using web2 app and you found that hey for e-commerce Brands a lot of e-commerce Brands will take users to the website because it's just an easier experience and teu is doing a great job of trying to really Drive users from the web to the app itself so that's what seamless deep linking is all about

5:29

lastly I want to point out just how seamless airbridge deep links are compared to Firebase so here you can see unlike Firebase Dynamic links fdls they don't have any interstitials so it go straight into the app where's here with Firebase you're going to have interstitial pages in between so with airbridge you're going straight in to the app with no need for interstitials now let's see it all in action compared to Firebase here's a Facebook Messenger demo where airbridge took less than 3 seconds and Firebase took a whopping six seconds there another one with a Facebook post again airbridge win spoiler alert and lastly here's one through an Instagram DM again airbridge took half the time that it took Firebase for these deep links look they're compatible with everything else like everything else should be all right here we go so this is the main thing every time you create a deep link you get a QR code you can use that QR code

6:36

in offline marketing materials think Flyers think and this hasn't worked for other app developers but think these cards and these cards like if you have a partnership with a store like a brick and mortar store if you have a partnership with that you can use QR codes I've seen apps use QR codes as receipts when they're complementing a physical product so that's another way that you can use it but airbridge is the only tool that has this QR code feature that is the main thing that I really wanted to highlight these particular features and obviously you can custom brand it so if you want to say at masters.com or c.com and have these deep links look like they're part of your entire brand you can do that as well for those bigger companies out there all right shall we get into the tool itself here it is here's airbridge and I've got one of the reports and I've got reports Trend right here and you can see this is

7:27

a sample report that airbridge has put together and it's for their app right here it's a dummy account but I wanted to show you the type of details that you can see from a solution like airbridge has right here so you can see that the installs came from whatever Channel and this is something that you control you get to control these particular links and so if you're using influencer marketing podcast these are great examples of you having a unique link for each and every single campaign and having a dashboard to see how well these campaigns have done so you can see all the install data right here from the different channels all right the other thing that you can do and here's one of the things I really wanted to highlight is this link generation so look if you're going to set it up I want to kind of show you this too you want to install the SDK and we are going to show you live data for our app IND the apppp

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Santa and we're going to integrate this solution into our app and we want to have a seamless experience cuz we promote app deals on Twitter and different social media platforms and we want to link newer users to our app to unlock the deal all right so that's how we're going to do it but after you set it up here's the app settings now I want to show you this real quick cuz airbridge helped me set this up but you can see it's linking to their app right here and then you can put your own website so I want to just quickly highlight that but really get into the link generation aspect of it and so here you can say let's say for us we want to do a Tik Tok influencer right so that's the main Channel you can say the medium is going to just be Tik Tok you know if you've done any of these UTM campaigns through PPC campaigns this is familiar to you so now maybe this Tik Tok influencer is Steve p young and then the

9:12

ad creative is I don't know dashboard right now we've already set up the app links so that's going to be automatically done all right and if you want to use custom product pages you can so you just put in the link here now this is where it says if the person is on Android go to the default store listing or you can do custom listing or you can even do a web URL right if you're really just trying to get people into the web site you can do that but I'm going to keep it the default here's the iOS if you want to use custom product pages for the different influencers great way to do that as well or you can use a default page then lastly this is sort of like the backup this is going to be your website URL so there's a backup too and then you can put right here hey Tik Tok Steve p young so you put a custom short link you can change some of these social settings too you can upload an image you can put a

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description ATMs all that stuff and boom you're done you created the link and here's the short version of the link right here and this is custom you can custom this but this is then the link that you send to your influencer you say Hey influencer whenever you're promoting our stuff our app please use this link here's a QR code if you want to put the pr code in there as well but that's how easy it is and then if you're going to track the performance of this campaign will you come here into the trend right here and here are the different metrics that you can actually pull to so if you got events set up like purchases registrations you can set all that up pretty easily right now we're just tracking installs but you can set up different events that you want to pull and it's a great way to do a more affordable solution to do affiliate marketing to do influencer marketing so you can truly track the performance of

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an influencer all right I know a lot of you are worried about what this might migration is going to look like how overwhelming it is but don't worry airbridge FDL migration template allows you to quickly convert your Firebase Dynamic links your FDL links to airbridge deep links and the key is pay attention without code and without a developer no stress we're going to go through each and every step in this demo step one all you want to do is export Your Fire based Dynamic links next you're going to map your parameters to air bra tracking links lastly you're going to paste the converted parameters into the tracking link generator boom and now you've converted all your links into air branch links and no one will know the difference now you can go live with airbridge deep links just copy and paste those links into your campaigns and you're ready to go just as good as FDL but maybe even better and the coolest part is no one

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will even know that you switched out your deep link provider no hassle for you and more importantly no broken Journeys for your users lastly go check out airbridge deep links if you're looking for an alternative to Firebase deep links F dl's and you could use the link up here in this info somewhere on this YouTube video or just use your favorite link into the favorite podcast app and YouTube description and let airbridge know that you heard it on ATMs if you're liking these videos make sure you hit that like and comment for any questions we're going to go through a lot of our YouTube comments and start creating video content out of that all right until next time I'll see you on the next video