I'm not even sure their engineers understand how annoying it is. They've implemented links in such a horrible way, and it's gotten worse with time (for example, there is a feature where if you open a link and have the right associated app installed, it will open the link in the app. There used to be a way to force the link to open in Safari in case you didn't want to open the app; it'd show up in the top right. The feature is gone now and it's hidden in a very strange place that is unintuitive to find and difficult to perform–you need to long press on the link and open it from there, but this invariably happens after you've opened the link, it opens the app, and you go back to Safari to now open it there.)
this sounds like a privacy issue and should be filed as a bug. if I can't open a link in a private tab in Safari (or ideally the browser of my choice) then I can not protect my privacy. The launched app will get to record my activity or via the non private browser tab the site will track me.
file a bug / feedback that this is not in line with Apple's privacy first stance
It is more private for Apple to handle the universal link and deep link you into the installed app since arguably the navigation can happen on device. The moment you bring a browser into the picture you are dealing with network based navigation (unless service workers are used which is a pretty small chance these days)
This is so annoying. I hate being bounced around like this.
There used to be an issue with amazon with this where you’d try to buy an ebook and be bounced into the app, but you can’t buy ebooks in the app because amazon don’t want to pay Apple 30% of the cost. I just had to delete the amazon app to buy the book. Luckily their website works just as well.
I've noticed this starting to happen also. Click a YouTube video and it wants to open in the YouTube app which gives me only two options: Update or Quit. Or opens Instagram which then forgets the profile/image I was actually trying to view.
