Android is a pretty flexible and open platform, allowing users to do what they want for the most part. The problem with that however, is that there is such a thing as too much choice. For users these days on Android, there are so many apps that can handle links or videos or whatever else that it can get a little annoying. Take your favorite news app for instance might be an app you use to zone out with the news, but then you see a link online and Chrome takes you to the app. What if you wanted to stay in the browser, because after all you were already in the browser? This is where Open Link With comes in.
Similar to the “Open File With…” dialog that a lot of computer users will be familiar, Open Link With leverages Android’s versatile Share menu to give you a little more control. Let’s take the Guardian news app for instance, it has the ability to open URLs within its Android app, so you could be looking at a Guardian article in Chrome and use the Share button to call up Open Link With. From there you can choose the Guardian app itself or something different. Open Link With is open source, which means the app in the Play Store is free to download and use, as well as the fact that other developers might help change the direction the app is headed over time, too.
Open Link With is perhaps not as flexible as other link-sharing apps, but it’s fairly neat and doesn’t get in the way whatever else you’re doing. Like we say, Open Link With gives you the control to choose which apps open what, but the only way I see this working properly is by setting Chrome, for example, to open everything as default. Otherwise, you’ll see the same popup that this little app shows up twice in a row. Needless to say, if you’re annoyed at seeing the popup to open content in which apps, Open Link With is a nice alternative that can streamline things and allow you to have your say.
