Launch It Scheme... 325 (ish) custom schemes you can use to launch other apps from your WP8 app

Matt Lacey: Awesome with Windows Phone - 325 Windows Phone apps you can launch from your own app

Have you noticed how some apps exist that will let you create tiles that launch other apps? Or that some apps will link to other apps?

If you didn't know, this is done through the app being launched having defined a custom scheme (or protocol) that can be used to launch it.

There is no public repository of registered schemes but this information is available via the metadata in the store. With a bit of free time I wrote a crawler to find all the schemes I could.

Here's what I found through checking the top 300 apps in each category.

Some points worth noting:

• This list is not exhaustive.
• There is no guarantee that these apps or schemes will be around in the future.
• Not all apps are available in all markets so some people may not be able to find anything when searching for certain schemes.
• Some schemes are used for a LOT of unrelated apps. e.g. "xplatformcloudkit" which is applied to all apps generated with the XPlatformCloudKit.
• Some apps may require certain values to be passed to open correctly.

If you're a developer and want to know how to launch apps with the above schemes see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/hh701480.aspx
If you want to publish a scheme for your app see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsphone/develop/jj206987(v=vs.105).aspx#BKMK_URIassociations

You may find more information on some of the above schemes at http://developer.nokia.com/community/wiki/URI_Association_Schemes_List

In a word... Awesome... I love that he wrote code to grab this list...