Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Threads and Snapchat do not hand a tapped link to your phone's browser. They open it in a stripped-down browser they control, inside their own app. That browser has no saved logins, often blocks payment sheets, and cannot open your native apps. It is the single biggest reason a link that works on your desktop loses buyers on a phone.
plugwith.me detects that browser and hands the visitor over to the real one — Safari or Chrome — before the destination loads. That is the deeplink switch on every link, on by default.
Direct mode
- The hand-off happens on page load, before anything is rendered.
- The fastest option, and the right default for a direct link.
- On some iOS in-app browsers an automatic hand-off is silently dropped, so the visitor gets a single tap-to-open button instead. That is the fallback working, not a bug.
Indirect mode
- The page renders inside the in-app browser, and the hand-off happens when the visitor taps a button.
- iOS requires a real tap before it will follow certain app links, so this mode is the more reliable one for linktrees.
- Use it when the visitor should see the page first.
Test on a real phone, from inside the app you post in. An in-app browser cannot be reproduced by resizing a desktop window, and the behaviour differs between iOS and Android and between apps.
Frequently asked questions
Does the visitor see anything odd during the hand-off?
A blank moment, typically under a second. In direct mode there is no page to render, so there is nothing to flash.
What happens on a normal browser?
Nothing. There is nothing to escape, so the visitor goes straight to the destination.