App Store link tools, compared
Four categories of product get recommended for the same job, and they solve four different problems.
6 August 2026 ยท PAD team
The categories
| Category | Solves | Does not solve |
|---|---|---|
| Shorteners | long ugly addresses | anything about where the tap lands |
| Link-in-bio pages | multiple destinations | the store step itself |
| Attribution platforms | which campaign produced an install | taps that never arrive |
| Routing links | reaching the right store from any browser | post-install screen targeting |
How to choose
Ask what is actually broken. If your address is unwieldy, shorten it. If you have several destinations, use a menu. If you cannot tell which campaign works, add attribution. If taps are dying between the ad and the store, none of those help and routing does.
Combining them
These stack rather than compete. A routing link in front of an attribution link is a common and sensible arrangement: the first gets the visitor out of the in-app browser, the second measures and personalises.
The arrangement that does not work is attribution alone for social traffic, because the measurement is accurate about taps that reached nothing.
The question to ask a vendor
"What happens when your link is tapped inside the Instagram browser on an iPhone?" The answer separates products that thought about this from products that assume a browser is a browser.
Test it yourself rather than trusting the answer: create a link, put it in a story visible only to you, and tap it from your phone.
If the broken part is taps not arriving, that is the one thing we do.