Hi everyone,
I’m Nick, a product manager on Bubble’s mobile team.
Earlier this month, we shipped deep linking support for push notifications, giving you control over where users land when they tap a notification. Today, we’re taking that a step further with a new workflow action Create a mobile deep link that separates the navigation configuration from the push notification action itself. This way, you can generate a deep link URL as a standalone value and use it anywhere: in an email, an SMS, a clipboard action, a database field, or any other workflow step.
How to get started
Open any workflow and look for Create a mobile deep link under the Native Mobile category in the action picker. The action uses the same navigation settings you already know from push notification deep linking — destination view, navigation type, overlay, view parameters — so there’s nothing new to learn.
The action returns a text value called Deep link URL, which you can use in any subsequent workflow step as Result of step X → Deep link URL. You can test on BubbleGo first and then submit a new build or OTA to test on your device in production. Check out the documentation for a full setup guide.
The action is available in backend workflows, web workflows, and mobile workflows.
What you can build with this
Here are some of the flows that this makes possible:
- Transactional emails with direct links: Generate a link to a specific record and drop it into an email so recipients land exactly where they need to be.
- In-app sharing: Let users copy a link to the content they’re viewing and share it via iMessage, WhatsApp, or any other channel.
- Consistent push and email destinations: Use the same navigation configuration in both your push notifications and your emails without duplicating setup.
- Stored links for onboarding: Generate a deep link during signup, save it to the database, and retrieve it later when the user completes onboarding
One thing to keep in mind
Deep link URLs capture a snapshot of your data at the moment the action runs. For example, if you generate a link to a specific record, that link will always point to that record regardless of when it’s tapped. This is consistent with how push notification deep linking works, and it means your links are stable and predictable — just be aware that they reflect the state of your data when the link was created, not when it’s opened.
What’s next
The generated URLs currently use custom app schemes (like myapp://). Our highest-priority follow-up for this feature is HTTPS-based deep links, also known as Universal Links on iOS and App Links on Android. Custom scheme URLs can be blocked by some email clients and don’t provide a fallback if the app isn’t installed, so universal link support will be an important improvement. In addition, we’d like to introduce link shortening out of the box since these links can get fairly long, especially if you are passing in a few parameters.
Give it a try and let us know how it goes in the thread below.
— Nick and the mobile team