What is deep linking? Well, it is the hot new topic in mobile and rightfully so. When you click a link on the web, where does it bring you? To that link, correct? That is not the case with apps, or at least it wasn’t until companies like Deeplink brought this ability to thousands of mobile developers. What would traditionally happen in mobile is that you would tap a link in an app leading to another app, and it would launch the second app, but not jump you into the specific page. That means a far worse user experience and it also means much lower conversions when it comes to mobile advertising.

However, if you are one single network of apps, cross promotion with deep linking becomes a whole lot more intuitive and easy to deliver.

On a much higher level, this whole trend of app constellations also means that mobile publishers are going to try a lot harder to acquire users. The rich get richer and the big companies get bigger and more dominant on your home screen.

All of this will of course be magnified in the coming years as independent mobile publishers begin to leverage APIs to build out a strong ecosystem for their apps. The most recent example is Slack that just raised a whopping $120m for its mobile communication app that only launched one year ago.

What is interesting about Slack is that it is not just an app but it offers teams hundreds of integrations that they can use to improve the way they communicate. So Slack itself is somewhat of a network of apps, if you think about it.

We will be seeing a lot more of these types of stories when medium size mobile developers realize they cannot just release one app and expect to compete with companies like Google or Yahoo that are buying smaller companies every day to increase the strength of the app constellations. At the end of the day, this is a positive trend since it encourages innovation but make no mistake about it, for the near future, mobile developers are going to have to work a lot harder to be discovered, retain users, and effectively monetize their apps!