Bitly and App Store links

A shortener answers a presentation question. Store links in social apps are a routing question.

6 August 2026 · PAD team

What Bitly gives you

A short address, click counts, and a custom domain on paid plans. All useful, none of it related to whether the destination opens.

What happens in an in-app browser

The short link resolves inside the same WebView, redirects to apps.apple.com, and receives Apple's redirect into itms-appss://, which the WebView cannot follow. Identical outcome to the long link, plus one extra round trip.

The parameter problem

Some shorteners drop query strings when redirecting, which silently removes campaign tokens. The link keeps working and your attribution quietly stops. Verify what actually reaches the store:

curl -sIL 'https://bit.ly/example' | grep -i '^location'

Click counts are not arrivals

A shortener counts the redirect, which happens whether or not the store ever opens. So its dashboard shows healthy numbers for traffic that landed nowhere, in exactly the same way the ad platform does.

Where a shortener is right

Print, packaging, spoken addresses, anywhere a human reads and types the link. Those visitors end up in a real browser where the plain store URL works, and shortness genuinely helps.