At Facebook’s f8 conference today, product manager Ilya Sukhar unveiled App Links, a new open, cross-platform standard for app-to-app linking. It enables developers to expose deep links in their own apps, and link to other apps.

“App Links lets you to map your web content to your mobile content,” says Facebook’s Ming Li. “All you need to do is add a few tags to your web content and you’re ready to let other developers link directly into your mobile app. If you’re a mobile-only app, we’ve got you covered. You can publish your tags using Parse Cloud Code, App Links Hosting API, or any other service you prefer.”

“We’ve added App Links support in our own apps on iOS and Android,” says Li. “Most links on News Feed or profile will support App Links, including links shared by apps, pages and even status updates when people copy and paste a URL. We’ve partnered with great apps and content owners to support this standard. Many of the top mobile apps have deeply integrated App Links including Mailbox, Quip, and Spotify. And we’ve also partnered with over 20 others to make their content available for linking, starting today. These include Pinterest, Redfin, Goodreads, Edomondo, Hulu, Flixter, Wattpad, Venmo, MovieTickets.com, Mixcloud, Rdio, SoundCloud, Tumblr, EyeEm, Houzz, Flickr, Vevo, Vimeo, Rhapsody, Fancy.com, iHeart, Songkick, and DailyMotion.”

This combined with the kind of app linking Google is doing could go a long way towards making mobile app ecosystems more web-like.

More on implementation here.

Image via Facebook