Nice write up! Makes the feature much easier to understand and it's good that you've provided feedback from those who use it already in production.

TL;DR you can, but you lose the ability to pass data through install.

Absolutely. The unfortunately side effect is when these users open your app, you won't know where they came from. Using text-me-the-app allows us to link a desktop link click to the same user downloading on mobile and opening the app. You lose the ability to pass data through install, and you lose install attribution. It's a tradeoff--for you, personalizing onboarding, rewarding users or having install attribution may be less important than taking them straight to the App Store.

You can either point desktop users to the App Store on an app-wide basis (https://dashboard.branch.io/#/settings/link) or on a per-link basis using the reserved key $desktop_url (as Abbey pointed out). Let me know if this is unclear.

Yeah, link redirection is customizable. You just add a value for $desktop_url in the link dictionary: https://dev.branch.io/link_configuration/

We are going to automate the uploading of templates within the coming weeks--the goal is to have a library of open-source templates that anyone can use, or contribute to. When you create or edit an existing template, you’ll have the option to make it public or private. Even cooler than that is that we’ll allow you to customize the templates to make use of whatever custom tags that you choose to attach to the links.

If you want to use a custom template now, drop a note to support@branch.io and we'll get it uploaded for you.