One possible fix for the iOS 9.x Safari/Mail link bug

I can’t test this, since I don’t have a device that suffers from the “dead links” issue. But if you do have such a device, and can’t wait for Apple to roll out a fix, give this a try.

It’s a pretty interesting read. Clearly, the author implies that the problem is with the Bookings.com app, but it could be some other app as well.

From this post by Benjamin Mayo on 9to5Mac:

Previously, we pinpointed Bookings.com as a cause of the bug, although noting it affects other apps as well. On Twitter, it was found that their website association file, used by the system for the universal links feature introduced with iOS 9, was many megabytes, grossly oversized. This would essentially overload the daemon that had to parse these files, causing the crashing. The Booking.com app has since corrected its payload file to be a far more reasonable 4 kilobytes. Users of Booking.com should delete and reinstall the app, to refresh the system caches for the URL association file.

However, Booking.com is not the only case of a developer misusing the API, so people who continue to experience bugs will also find that they have other apps installed on the system which are also registering thousands of URLs. Unfortunately, it is practically impossible to find out which apps are the misdemeanours. In terms of high-profile cases, we have heard that Wikipedia and Eat 24 are among the apps registering too many domains in their universal link directory.

Sounds like no one ever tested iOS 9 with a massive list of universal links.

From the Universal Links page in Apple’s iOS Developer Library:

When you support universal links, iOS 9 users can tap a link to your website and get seamlessly redirected to your installed app without going through Safari. If your app isn’t installed, tapping a link to your website opens your website in Safari.