QR Codes That Route to the Appropriate App Store
When I announced PokerNexus earlier this week, I mentioned in passing that it deploys "a separate shortlink host for printed links." This post covers what that host does and why it's built the way it is. I wanted business cards with a QR code on the back that says "Download." The trouble is that a QR code encodes exactly one URL, while "download the app" means three different places depending on who scans it: An iPhone should land on the App Store listing. An Android phone should land on the Google Play listing.
- ▪When I announced PokerNexus earlier this week, I mentioned in passing that it deploys "a separate shortlink host for printed links." This post covers what that host does and why it's built the way it is.
- ▪I wanted business cards with a QR code on the back that says "Download." The trouble is that a QR code encodes exactly one URL, while "download the app" means three different places depending on who scans it: An iPhone should land on the Ap
- ▪An Android phone should land on the Google Play listing.
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Record
| Original publisher | Matt Huggins |
| Canonical URL | https://matthuggins.com/blog/posts/qr-codes-that-route-to-the-appropriate-app-store |
| Publication time | Thu, 24 Sep 2026 15:51:03 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-24T16:35:26.574Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-24T16:35:26.574Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | w064zt0xYITj · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
When I announced PokerNexus earlier this week, I mentioned in passing that it deploys "a separate shortlink host for printed links." This post covers what that host does and why it's built the way it is. The goal was simple. I wanted business cards with a QR code on the back that says "Download." The trouble is that a QR code encodes exactly one URL, while "download the app" means three different places depending on who scans it: An iPhone should land on the App Store listing. An Android phone should land on the Google Play listing. Everything else (a laptop, a crawler, a device I can't identify) should land on the website. Printed cards also can't be updated once they're in someone's wallet, so the URL on them needs to keep working even if the destinations change later.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Matt Huggins.
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