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nailandgear
nailandgear
Level 1.5: Cupcake
April 13, 2026
Question

Can MDM enforce app link / default URL handler registration?

  • April 13, 2026
  • 1 reply
  • 67 views

We have a BYOD deployment where users enroll their personal Android devices and get a work profile. Inside the work profile, we deploy an internal app that handles URLs for one specific corporate domain (e.g. internalapp.company.com). We also deploy Edge as the default browser in the work profile.

Desired behavior:

  • Links to internalapp.company.com → open in our app
  • All other links → open in Edge as normal

The problem: We cannot host assetlinks.json publicly on that domain, so standard App Links verification is not an option.

What does work (manually): On each device, going to Settings → Apps → [Our App] → Open by default → Add link and checking the domain works perfectly. After that, links from Slack, email, etc. open in our app as expected.

But we have hundreds of devices and need this enforced administratively through MDM (Intune/WorkspaceOne).

Has anyone found a way to push this domain-to-app association via MDM policy in Work Profile mode? Or any other enterprise-managed approach that avoids the assetlinks.json requirement?

Appreciate any ideas, this feels like it should be a solved problem for enterprise apps on internal domains, but we're hitting a wall.

Thanks!

1 reply

Alex_Muc
Alex_Muc
Level 3.0: Honeycomb
April 14, 2026

I don't think you can use individual URLs to bypass the default app. If you can customize the app and design links freely, URI-Deep-Links might be the solution. Slack and email, for example, work because they use Uri deep links. (slack:// and mailto)

nailandgear
nailandgearAuthor
Level 1.5: Cupcake
April 14, 2026

Thanks for the suggestion! I think custom URI schemes (like myapp://) would work if we controlled how links are generated and shared, but we don't users share standard https:// links in Slack, email, etc. and we need those to open in our app.
The behavior we're after is exactly how YouTube works: when you tap an https://youtube.com link, it opens in the YouTube app directly. YouTube achieves this through App Links (assetlinks.json). We want the same behavior but can't host assetlinks.json publicly on our internal domain so we're looking for an MDM-enforced alternative to achieve the same result.

Youtube App Settings page.

 

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