The smart routing playbook: one link for every device, geo and moment

Start with the visitor, not the URL

The best routing setups are written down as sentences first: "iOS users go to the App Store, Android users to Play, everyone else to the landing page." Once the sentence is clear, the rules are trivial — device condition, two redirects, one default.

The four patterns that cover 90% of cases

Almost every smart link we see in production is a variation of one of these:

• Platform split — App Store / Play Store / web fallback from a single QR code
• Geo split — country-specific shops, languages or legal pages
• Time window — promo target while the campaign runs, evergreen page after
• Traffic split — 50/50 A/B between two landing pages, measured per variant

Keep a default, always

Rules should be the exception path, not the only path. A link with conditions but no default will eventually meet a visitor you did not predict — a new device class, a VPN exit node, a crawler. The default keeps that visit useful instead of dead.