What You Need to Know About App URL Scheme
I’ve recently been using Beijing Yitongxing to scan QR codes to ride buses and subways. To be more efficient, I started researching whether I could pop up the subway or bus code with one click. After all, finding the App, launching it, and then switching to the corresponding ride code is quite cumbersome.
The core of this feature—one click to open a specific page in an App—is essentially a URL Scheme. The key is whether I can obtain that information.
To summarize, I could only manage to open the Yitongxing App with RuubyPay://
, but I couldn’t get to the specific subway or bus code page. This is because I couldn’t find the relevant SDK or didn’t guess the correct page URL. Although I didn’t fully solve the problem, I did figure out the general method for finding the URL Scheme of a specific App, which could be useful in the future.
Basic Methods
Google/GitHub Search
The first step is always to search widely since many others may have already found it, like
weixin://scanqrcode
for WeChat’s QR code scanner.Official Documentation
Some well-documented apps provide detailed information about URL Schemes, such as Surge or Things. For apps like WeChat or Meituan, however, there isn’t systematic documentation, so users rely on community discoveries, which is less ideal.
Checking the
info.plist
with tools like iMazing, or directly viewing the app’s contents in Finder for Mac apps.Search for the
CFBundleURLSchemes
keyword ininfo.plist
; the array values will be the URL Schemes.