problem with UIWebview and link to App Store

Question

In my iPhone application I have a UIWebview that shows an html page. Inside that page there are links that should lead the user to the iTunes application and the application they tapped on. However, when the user taps on the link it errors out with 'too many redirects'. Looking at it with a packet sniffer I see it just keeps redirecting to the same http://phobos.apple.com/... URL. I even tried changing the link scheme to 'itms://' but that results in a 'Cannot show URL' error. I could solve this problem by trapping the URLRequest and sending openURL: to the UIApplication but the app has already been deployed and I don't want to patch it. I rather do it on the html/js/server side if possible. Anyone have any ideas?

Answer 1

For anyone still searching for this answer, I found that it seems to be a problem on the simulator which doesn't support itms:// URLs (because there's no App Store app). I didn't see the same issue on hardware, where the App Store app opens just fine (in my case this was when testing URLs from AdMob adverts, but it's probably the same for UIWebView).