How to open Twitter and Facebook app with Phonegap?

Question

I am trying to have my PhoneGap application link to open a specific users profile page in the Twitter app. I know not everyone has the Twitter app installed on their device

Answer 1

Just a reference for others who might come here and want a bit more:

I've been able to get this working well (so far) on both iOS and Android, and dynamically falling back to the browser using the code below.

Required plugins are cordova-plugin-inappbrowser and cordova-plugin-appavailability

function openBrowser (url) {
    if (!url) {
        return;
    }

    // turn my url into a scheme/intent url
    getAvailabilityScheme(url, function (url) {
        window.open(url, '_system');
    });
}

function getAvailabilityScheme (url, callback) {
    var schemeOrPackage;
    var schemeUrl;

    // check for appavaialbility plugin
    if (!window.appAvailability) {
        callback(url);
    }

    // facebook
    if (url.indexOf('facebook.com/') !== -1) {
        schemeOrPackage = isAndroid ? 'com.facebook.katana' : 'fb://'
        schemeUrl = 'fb://profile/' + url.split('facebook.com/')[1];
    }

    // twitter
    if (url.indexOf('twitter.com/') !== -1) {
        schemeOrPackage = isAndroid ? null : 'twitter://'
        schemeUrl = 'twitter://user?screen_name=' + url.split('twitter.com/')[1];
    }

    if (schemeOrPackage && schemeUrl) {
        window.appAvailability.check(schemeOrPackage, function () {
            callback(schemeUrl);
        }, function () {
            callback(url);
        });
    } else {
        callback(url);
    }
}

Using it is easy, just call the openBrowser(url) method with a normal website url. The only issue i found was that for a facebook page, it needs to an ID not the slug name