Better URL’s for your apps

Saturday, October 31st, 2009

One minor issue when directing people to your apps on the App Store is the long and hard to read urls that iTunes employs for its content. This is all fine if you’re just providing a direct link to your app on a web page but if you want a more human readable url to give out you need to do something custom. I think there’s a shorter url scheme for apps in the App Store as well but I’m not positive and I can’t seem to find it so I’m posting another solution.

I noticed in a recent tweet by ngmoco that they were directing people to their recently released Elimate game using this url: http://appstore.ngmoco.com/eliminate/. I’m not sure if they’re using the method I’m going to describe but this is one way you can accomplish this “nicer” url redirect.

So what you need to do is first determine/create the domain/sub domain you want to use for this. I ended up using http://appstore.statik.ca/.

Then create a .htaccess file and put the following lines in (obviously replacing the urls with your own, and adding/removing as many lines as you need).

Redirect 301 /closet/ http://itunes.apple.com/[rest of url to your app]

Redirect 301 /closetlite/ http://itunes.apple.com/[rest of url to your app]

Redirect 301 / http://itunes.apple.com/[rest of url to your company]

The first two lines are for both of my applications Closet (http://appstore.statik.ca/closet/) and Closet Lite (http://appstore.statik.ca/closetlite/). The third line is for anyone hitting http://appstore.statik.ca/ directly which takes them to all the apps I have on the App Store. It’s important to note to place this line last after all sub directory redirects you might have otherwise it won’t redirect properly.

After you have your .htaccess file created just upload it to your domain of choice and you now have nice readable urls to give out for your applications.