WhatsApp URL on iOS vs Android

AppSheet AppSheet Q&A
1

Hi everyone!

This is nor necessarily an Appsheet problem, but I want to know if someone can help me with this.

I have an app which can open Whatsapp messages usng an “open URL” action button. It also pre-fills the message with text from the Appsheet. Here is the expression used to make the link:

CONCATENATE(“https://wa.me/1”,[Cell Phone],“?text=”,ENCODEURL(Current User[Message Text]))

this works perfectly on Android phones, but on iOs devices it shows up as “link cannot be opened”. I carefully read WhatsApp’s documentation for URL links, but I don’t see any problem with the link.

https://faq.whatsapp.com/425247423114725/?cms_platform=iphone

https://faq.whatsapp.com/5913398998672934

On android it works fine. Can anyone see what I’m doing wrong?

Thanks!

2

I found the problem. the phone number field had parentheses and dashes, which messed up the URL link. I’m not sure why it was working on android though. Rather than fix all of the phone numbers, I modified the expression to remove all of the special characters using SUBSTITUTE(). Here is the new expression, which works on iOS.

CONCATENATE(“https://wa.me/1”,SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE([Cell Phone],“(”,“”),“)”,“”),“-”,“”)," “,”“),”?text=",ENCODEURL(Current User[Message Text]))

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