Is it possible to force my app to fetch a new apple-app-site-association file?

Question

I have been reading around and found a couple of existing answers about apple-app-site-association caching:

• on the Apple forums.
• on Stackoverflow.

These answers all indicate that the association file is fetched from the web on install/update only.

This is worrisome to me because it means that I need to sync updates to the file with releases of my app.

It also means that if some URLs that I do not want universally linked (e.g. my contact page's, /contact) were not initially blacklisted from my association file, users that do not update my app will have a broken experience forever when trying to access that page.

My question is: does anyone here know of a way to force my app to update its association file without needing to release a new version and wait for all my users to update?

Edit and also, why?

Answer 1

It is not possible to force this. Apple does not disclose the update criteria, but working with this all day, I can assure you that install/update are the only times I've ever seen this file scraped.

A better alternative is to use a hosted deep link platform like Branch.io (full disclosure: I'm on the Branch team), because then you don't need to worry about updating the apple-app-store-association config after it's set the first time.