How to make ios App Store link with parameters?

Question

The new "smart app banners" have a method where you can pass parameters to yor app so that it can know, for examples what page on your site the user was on before they bought your app. This is useful, for example, with a news site where you ant to show them the article you were previously displaying.

The way to do this with he smart app banners is:

<meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=311507490, app-argument=http://bookID/1234"/>

Is there a way to make a general link that does this, instead of a smart app banner?

Solution

The advantage of smart app banners is that the iOS detects if the app is installed or not. If it is installed on the device the banner opens the app directly. Otherwise it takes you to the app store.

A disadvantage is that they only show up in mobile safari and they require iOS 6.

As an alternative you could use custom URL schemes. The application has to implement this scheme. The URL would look like this: myapp://bookID/1234.

You can also check if this link works (app is installed) using javascript.