Improve X-Callback-URL

[robbiet480]

No description provided.

[SeanPM5]

Implemented here: https://companion.home-assistant.io/docs/integrations/x-callback-url

[TomBrien]

Re-opening as no changes have actually been made since this was open. I believe the idea here is improve the content. Certainly this is a case where we mention something but provide usage example.

[SeanPM5]

Ah OK, my bad.

So I dabbled with this stuff very briefly like a decade ago. But from what I remember this was sort of a clever "hack" way for apps to talk to each other in the relatively early days of iOS (like iOS 4 or 5 or something). It was something indie devs brainstormed together and added to their apps then it grew from there; but was never something official from Apple.

Then Workflow came along which gave this stuff a nice GUI so people didn't need to use URL schemes anymore. Workflow became fairly popular and was eventually acquired by Apple and rebranded into Shortcuts, which also changed how things work behind the scenes.

My understanding is that x-callback-URL was largely made obsolete by Shortcuts. It still works, but everything it can do is supported by Shortcuts which most people will use instead. I might be way off on this though, Robbie probably knows more on this subject and could correct me if I'm wrong.

I think maybe we should merge URL Handler, X-Callback-URL, and Universal Links all into one page since they're just different ways of doing the same thing AFAIK. Each of those three pages has only a paragraph of text and would be hard to difficult to flesh out much further I think, so it'd make sense to combine them? Maybe call the page Advanced URL Features or something like that.

[TomBrien]

I think that's a good idea. They all seem very similar to me. Need to have a play with and get those working.