React-Native openURL Twitter Link Issues - react-native

Question

I'm displaying a twitter feed in my app which is being pulled in from the twitter API. As the tweets don't show the full text there is a twitter short code URL (t.co) to view the full tweet.
The problem I'm having is when I click the URL using openURL it opens in a browser, which redirects to the twitter app and redirects back to the browser to display the tweet.
This works if I have the twitter app already open - if it's not open the final redirect back to the browser doesn't load the page.
Everything works fine if there's no twitter app installed it just loads in a browser.
Is there a way to avoid the redirects and just have the t.co URLs open in the twitter app if it's installed?

Answer 1

So I managed to solve this issue by first creating a URL unshortener in PHP:
<?php
$url = $_GET['url'];
$context = stream_context_create(
array(
'http' => array(
'follow_location' => false
)
)
);
$html = file_get_contents($url, false, $context);
$final = str_replace("location: ",'',$http_response_header[5]);
echo json_encode ($final,JSON_PRETTY_PRINT);
?>
Then from react-native fetch the full URL from the unshortener:
if (href.contains('https')) {
var short = {
getInfo() {
var myUrl = 'expander.php?url='+href
return fetch(myUrl).then((res) => res.json()).catch(function(error) {
Alert.alert(error+'');
});
}
}
short.getInfo().then((res) => {
var final = res.replace('i/web','web');
Linking.openURL(final);
})
} else {
Linking.openURL(href)
}
It was important to replace 'i/web' in the URL string with 'web' so the app opens the link natively rather than opening a mobile link.