How to Link to Apps on the App Store

There are a few reasons to link to your app or another app in the app store. You may want to do this if your customer has a paid version of their app that their free version can link to or if they want to be able to show their whole line of products (other apps) from a simple button click. Below are the prerequisites and steps for the United States.

Prerequisites

• Access to your customer’s iTunes Connect account (either your own account, or their credentials)
• An active application create in iTunes Connect (not just the Apple Developer portal)
• An internet connection
• A device to test with

Step-by-step guide

1. Login to your customer’s iTunes Connect account
2. Go to Manage Apps
3. Click the application you want to link to
4. Look for a field called Apple ID (will be a link of numbers)
5. Form the URL in the following structure http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/id(insert Apple ID here)&mt=8
6. This will link to the app in the US App store. If your app is not us based in the United States app store market, then the replace the ‘us’ in the url with the appropriate 2 letter country representation (e.g. UK for United Kingdom)
7. In your application use the following method:

   [[UIApplication sharedApplication] openURL:[NSURL URLWithString:@"(app store url here as string)"]];

8. Voila, presto, your app should open to the apps live link!

   Nothing will show if the app does not have a live version available, though you can use this information to predict the link and prevent the need to app update with the live link.

    

Alternative Ways to Link Apps

• A less reliable way is using a lesser known base URL appstore.com. You can append the title for your app based on the name entered in the iTunes Connect Portal. For instance: if you wanted to link to Angry Birds you would use appstore.com/angrybirds.
• If you want to link to a company/person’s apps then you can use appstore.com/(company name in app store here). For instance, you can use appstore.com/rovioentertainmentltd to get all Rovio applications.
• You can also replace appstore.com with itunes.com/apps/ to achieve the same affect.

Have an app you want to get on the market?