Apple’s ongoing work to improve its search features got a big boost on mobile today: Apple launched a search API for iOS 9. This will let developers index and link out their apps, making their content discoverable through the native search experience on iOS 9. In other words, you will now be able to search on your phone not just for apps on there, or for content on the web, but for whatever is within the apps apps you have on your device, through Apple’s main search feature.
The feature will sit alongside a wider upgrade of the search that will let you search for most frequent contacts and apps that you use throughout the day. It’s not clear yet how Apple will prioritise which results will come up at the top of in-app search results; it may be that it, too, will depend on which apps you are using most, rather than content that has been updated most recently.
The technology behind this is deep linking, the same technology that is used by startups like Quixey, DeepLink, Branch and Button to create services linking apps and the content within them together, to behave more like indexed content on the open web.
By way of example today Craig Federighi provided an example of searching for “potatoes” in the search window, which led to recipes from third party app Yummly.
Apple is not the only one adding deep linking into its mobile search features. In April, Google started showing results from Android apps that users didn’t have installed on their phones, which it expanded to iOS users in May. That comes after working on the technology for two years.
Google’s aim is to show users relevant content from apps they have installed, as well as point them to other apps they could download. In Google’s case, it points to these apps within Google Search, or Google’s native mobile application on users’ smartphones, while Apple’s deep linking is actually being baked in to iOS itself.
Before today, Apple offered App Extensions to developers, which did extend the functionality and allow apps to effectively communicate with each other for features such as widgets on the Today screen, and to offer photo filters within the iOS Photos app, or for custom keyboards.
Bringing that kind of power to search could not just be one more way for Apple to offer useful features to its users, but also one more way to lure them away from using Google quite so much, too. It’s also potentially a bit of an app usage killer, in that depending how much information you may need from the search, there may be times that you decide not to visit those apps at all post-search.
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