Use link instead of json for QR

[Harm-van-Stekelenburg]

We noticed some of our users scan QR codes with their camera app instead of directly in Yivi. The Yivi mobile app will pick up this link, and so will the camera. If the Yivi app is not installed it will redirect to the Yivi download page. Hopefully resulting in a more user friendly experience.

Maybe this needs some discussion but locally I checked it and it works nicely for us (android and ios), I'm not a mobile development expert so I could very well be overlooking things. But I didn't want to make an issue without a proposed solution.

[ivard]

This is a known issue indeed. The UX of the universal link fallback page is bad at the moment. Our assessment was that at this moment allowing people to scan the QR with their regular camera app without proper fallback behaviour on the universal link would make thinks worse. Then people get stuck somewhere half the flow instead of at the beginning. That is more frustrating for users, because we don't have control exactly where users get stuck. It's much harder to help users in that scenario. Therefore, the plan always was to combine this change with a UX improvement of the universal link fallback page.

This fallback page should not be just a dummy placeholder page. It should have some functionality built-in, because scanning a universal link is quite buggy, especially on Android, and does not lead users to the app all the times. For example:

• If people don't have the app installed yet, there should be a guided flow or at least manual instructions on how to install and configure the app (both iOS and Android).
• If people use Firefox for Android, there should be a fallback page that manually starts the app (Firefox for Android absorbs universal links by default)
• If people are in a mobile session, and they open a universal link by clicking on it, they should be in a separate flow that does not refer to QR codes. Otherwise, users get confused. Also, it should be opened in a separate browser tab to prevent that the page where the user tries to login disappears.

[Harm-van-Stekelenburg]

Thanks for the response, those are very clear considerations. I hadn't considered the UX of the fallback page, makes sense to combine that with the frontend package change.

[ivard]

We were also migrating from irma.app to open.yivi.app, so that was also a reason why we waited. open.yivi.app already works, but it doesn't have a fallback page yet and we still have to activate the forced app update procedure to ensure that there are not users anymore with an app version without open.yivi.app support.