Finally, now iOS apps can benefit from Google’s App Indexing protocol. Google announced this yesterday on the heels of Google I/O.

App Indexing is a way for app developers to feed Google the content within their native Android and now iOS apps. This way Google can index the content, rank it in the mobile results and trigger a command to open the app on your mobile device specifically to the page of content within the app.

This has been supported for Android apps for years and now it has come to iOS, at least for a select number of apps. More apps will be supported in the near future and you can get ready by adding the App Indexing mark up to your iOS and Android apps.

Here are the steps to get App Indexing for iOS:

Add deep linking support to your iOS app.
Make sure it’s possible to return to Search results with one click.
Provide deep link annotations on your site.
Let us know you’re interested. Keep in mind that expressing interest does not automatically guarantee getting app deep links in iOS search results.

With this, Google also announced support for deep linking via Google’s short URL service. You can use one short Google URL and depending on the device clicking on the URL, it may open the content on the web, iOS app or Android app. It all works with the same app indexing protocol.

With App Indexing, Google may show your app as an option to install on mobile searches, which benefits from the new mobile friendly ranking factors.

Here are some pictures:

This is great news for iOS developers.

Forum discussion at Google+.