Android - Adding at least one Activity with an ACT

Question

I am getting following tool tip in AndroidManifest.xml

App is not indexable by Google Search; consider adding at least one Activity with an ACTION-VIEW intent-filler. See issue explanation for more details.

Adds deep links to get your app into the Google index, to get installs and traffic to your app from Google Search.

Any one can explain why it is so?

Your Help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

You can remove the warning by adding the below code in <intent-filter> inside <activity>

<action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />

Answer 2

You can remove the warning by adding xmlns:tools="http://schemas.android.com/tools" to the <manifest> tag and tools:ignore="GoogleAppIndexingWarning" to the <application> tag.

Answer 3

From official documentation :

To enable Google to crawl your app content and allow users to enter your app from search results, you must add intent filters for the relevant activities in your app manifest. These intent filters allow deep linking to the content in any of your activities. For example, the user might click on a deep link to view a page within a shopping app that describes a product offering that the user is searching for.

Using this link Enabling Deep Links for App Content you'll see how to use it.

And using this Test Your App Indexing Implementation how to test it.

The following XML snippet shows how you might specify an intent filter in your manifest for deep linking.

<activity
    android:name="com.example.android.GizmosActivity"
    android:label="@string/title_gizmos" >
    <intent-filter android:label="@string/filter_title_viewgizmos">
        <action android:name="android.intent.action.VIEW" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.DEFAULT" />
        <category android:name="android.intent.category.BROWSABLE" />
        <!-- Accepts URIs that begin with "http://www.example.com/gizmos” -->
        <data android:scheme="http"
              android:host="www.example.com"
              android:pathPrefix="/gizmos" />
        <!-- note that the leading "/" is required for pathPrefix-->
        <!-- Accepts URIs that begin with "example://gizmos” -->
        <data android:scheme="example"
              android:host="gizmos" />

    </intent-filter>
</activity>

To test via Android Debug Bridge

$ adb shell am start
        -W -a android.intent.action.VIEW
        -d <URI> <PACKAGE>

$ adb shell am start
        -W -a android.intent.action.VIEW
        -d "example://gizmos" com.example.android