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Is there already an app or would it be possible to have an app which:

Catches http:// links that are clicked from any application and can redirect them to other apps other than safari.

For example a link to twitter could be set to goto Tweetbot, so http://twitter.com/adamdempsey would be clicked but it would actually load tweetbot://user_profile/adamdempsey

I know obviously this would be for jailbroken phones only, just asking if it could happen?

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So I trust you mean something like choosy, but for iphone. Good luck with that! ;) – Cawas May 19 '11 at 14:10
Have never seen choosy, will have to install that now thanks! But yea that's the same idea as what I'm thinking – Adam Dempsey May 20 '11 at 13:45
Do you consider this question to be unanswered? – Andrew Larsson Jun 12 '12 at 18:04

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

There's a JailBreak tweak called Browser Changer, and it does almost exactly what you want. It's in the standard repositories in Cydia, and it's free. I've used it to make all links automatically open with Dolphin Browser. It works quite well, but it can only make one app open all http links, so other than that, there isn't anything that does exactly what you want.

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But can it do a subset of URIs, like: http:// should generally go to mobile safari, but http://*.twitter.com/ should explicitly go to TweetBot? It must also apply the necessary transformations that the OP hinted at in his question, where it will open to a specific user page with specific regard to the apps address scheme. – Jason Salaz♦ Mar 25 '12 at 22:21
I haven't messed with the settings on it. I'll check. – Andrew Larsson Mar 25 '12 at 22:41
It turns out that it doesn't do exactly what the OP wanted, and after reading the question a few more times, I understand what they're asking for. I updated my answer. – Andrew Larsson Mar 25 '12 at 22:55
1  
Looks like it's something the developer of Browser Changer might consider adding, will try contacting them. – Adam Dempsey Mar 27 '12 at 8:03
That's a great idea! Let us know how it goes. – Andrew Larsson Mar 27 '12 at 13:19
up vote 2 down vote

To the best of my knowledge, it is not possible to write an application that listens to http://anything. The fact that http://maps.google.com addresses shell out to the Maps application is a special case likely built explicitly into MobileSafari.

All other iOS applications may register on a special URL. For example, many Twitter clients register for the twitter:// protocol and usually have references like twitter://messages, twitter://replies, etc.

Unfortunately I don't know of a specific app to support customizing this in the Jailbreaking community.

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up vote 0 down vote accepted

There is now a tweak called LinkOpener by HASHBANG Productions on the BigBoss repo which does exactly this with Facebook, Twitter and eBay links.

They are working on a new version with setting which will allow you to choose if you have multiple applications, eg TweetBot and Twitterific etc.

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