On the raising side, you're absolutely right. A custom URL scheme generally captures what you want to do (i.e. the intent) not how. On the handling side, howev

On the raising side, you're absolutely right. A custom URL scheme generally captures what you want to do (i.e. the intent) not how. On the handling side, however, on iOS there are limitations that I think make them qualitatively different: - only one application can handle any given URL scheme - no mechanism (other than Apple apps win) for choosing between apps that want to handle a URL scheme - no notion of optionally handling a URL scheme based on its contents (which enables very useful filter-like behavior) - no notion of "returning" to whatever raised the request (there are schemes to hack around this, but they are limited and brittle) - built-in support for carrying general payloads (rather than having to encode them in a URL)