Link Cleaner PWA can help you quickly clean links on any device
Web links can often be annoying to share with other people, with tracking code and other unnecessarily variables often added to the end by apps or referring websites. It’s usually easy enough to remove the extra junk on a desktop computer, but the process can be more difficult and time-consuming on mobile, since text selection on touch screens doesn’t always work well. There’s a web app that might help, though: Link Cleaner.
Link Cleaner is a Progressive Web App, accessible with any browser at linkcleaner.app, which can remove unnecessarily sections from a web link with one click or tap (disclaimer: I am the developer). Pasting a link will instantly give you the cleaned version, with one-click options for copying the new link to the clipboard, sharing it to other applications on your device, or displaying a QR code for easy scanning by someone around you.
There are a few other ways to shorten links with Link Cleaner, besides opening the website. Since it’s a Progressive Web App, you can “install” it as a system application with browsers like Chrome and Microsoft Edge. On Android, installing Link Cleaner will also add it to the system share menu, so you can send links to Link Cleaner directly from any app with a share button. That way, it can be used as a quick filter when sharing links: tap Link Cleaner first, then tap Link Cleaner’s share button, then finally select the desired destination. Safari on iOS doesn’t support the required Web Share Target API, but a Siri Shortcut is available with the same functionality.
I’ve started to use Link Cleaner most often when sharing tweets from the Twitter Android app, which always adds tracking variables to the end of URLs that always take a few seconds to remove manually. I also use it almost anytime I’m writing articles from a tablet, because that can potentially mean dozens of links need to be cleaned up as much as possible, and that’s not fun to do over and over again with Android’s text selection.
Link Cleaner is open-source under the GPLv3 license, and all the code is available on GitHub.
