Being able to expand content offerings in such a distributed but definable way is going to turbo charge our efforts this year at YETi CGI.
Already today we started work testing deepviews to share opps from #points, our new ambient gamification platform. They will allow us to be so much more effective in onboarding users to immersive activity.
Thank You Branch :)
Disclosure: I'm an investor and was an early adopter of Branch.
Absolutely. The unfortunately side effect is when these users open your app, you won't know where they came from. Using text-me-the-app allows us to link a desktop link click to the same user downloading on mobile and opening the app. You lose the ability to pass data through install, and you lose install attribution. It's a tradeoff--for you, personalizing onboarding, rewarding users or having install attribution may be less important than taking them straight to the App Store.
You can either point desktop users to the App Store on an app-wide basis (https://dashboard.branch.io/#/settings/link) or on a per-link basis using the reserved key $desktop_url (as Abbey pointed out). Let me know if this is unclear.
If you want to use a custom template now, drop a note to support@branch.io and we'll get it uploaded for you.