No bug Facebook Share doesn’t open native app on mobile.

Hi,

Can you confirm that the Facebook Share button (not Messenger) doesn’t open up the mobile native app to share the website link?

Instead of opening up the native app, it opens a new tab in the mobile browser that requests the Facebook login, however I don't use the browser for that because I have the mobile app installed, the same for most people probably.

From the research I did today, it appears that this is the situation for any Facebook share from a website on mobile, but this appears strange to me, so can you confirm this is correct? I can't understand why Facebook would limit this.

Thanks,
Tom.

Hi Tom,

I can confirm that this is indeed the behaviour.
The reason is as follows:

when pressing the facebook share button, you actually click on the following link: facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u={url} (where {usr} is the page url

This link starts with https:// and that is where your mobile acts on: http(s) is 'registered' to your browser on your mobile. So clicking that link triggers the browser.
tis cannot be changed, because if you would register http(s) to the facebook app, then all links to websites would be opened with the facebook app.

In jsSocials there are two facebook messenger buttons:
1. that opens fb-messenger://share?link={url}
2. that opens www.facebook.com/dialog/send?app_id={app...direct_uri={redirect}

the first buttons can be set to only load on mobile devices: fb-messenger:// is registered to your facebook messenger app, so this starts the app
the second button can be set to load on desktop browsers and is register to your browser.

So in short: when facebook comes up with a share url that is linked to the facebook app (and not https://) then we can implement this. I am not aware is a different share url for facebook.

Thanks Ruud, that answers it.