Can Tempus handle opening links to my server?

[henrebotha]

If for example someone else on my Navidrome server (running at https://music.home/) sends me a share link (https://music.home/share/liu23b0K8T), and I click it, can Tempus handle opening that link? At present, the link just opens in my browser.

I don't know the specifics of how Android exposes this "handler" functionality, but I figure Tempus could potentially register a handler with Android based on the server URL(s) it knows.

[henrebotha]

I see my Samsung S23 doesn't list Tempus under "apps that can open links".

[eddyizm]

I have not looked into this but this makes me think that the feature would only be avaible to apps from Google Play or the Samsung store.

I believe someone else (maybe you?) opened up a feature request like this. Actually, it might have been a reddit comment.

[henrebotha]

https://developer.android.com/training/app-links/create-deeplinks Docs suggest that this is a global, universal Android feature. Might not require anything in particular.

[eddyizm]

that is a great find and good to know!

[henrebotha]

Upon further exploration, it seems that neither normal deeplinks nor App Links support having a runtime-definable domain. So this is basically a no-go.

There are two workarounds.

First, the community could agree on a real domain — say, https://tempus.xyz — that acts as App Link gateway. Someone in the community sets up a server there that hosts assetlinks.json (which is periodically updated with the SHA256 of each Tempus release) and redirects to a user-defined domain passed as query param. Some other stuff happens and then poof, Tempus can send a request that looks like https://tempus.xyz/launch?server=https://my-home-server.fun which will allow it to handle links for my-home-server.fun. Way complicated, but sure.

The other option is we need to use a custom URI scheme, like subsonic:// or something. We get Navidrome (and other sharing-enabled servers) to allow using this scheme for share links, and then it's very easy to update Tempus statically to handle that scheme OS-wide. Tricky thing I just realised though is that such a link wouldn't work for sharing with people not using Tempus though; whereas the normal https links happily take you to the Navidrome web player.

[henrebotha]

The custom scheme is workable, though.

• Community agrees to use a custom URI scheme like subsonic:// (or tempus:// or idk what).
• Community gets support for the custom scheme merged into Navidrome and other servers. (It's not clear to me at this point whether the OpenSubsonic API definition allows tweaking the url field; if not, then the community may also need to get support for this into the OpenSubsonic definition itself.)
  • Ideally, the custom scheme support would allow a sharer to choose to copy an https:// and/or a subsonic:// link; so you can send https:// to people who don't use Tempus, subsonic:// to people who do, or just send both and have people choose for themselves. Or it can just default to sending both?
• Tempus registers itself with Android to handle subsonic:// links.