What are App Pins and how do they work?

As you can see in the picture above, in the top right of the app there is a blue Install button. You tap it and it will conveniently load the app page, where you can directly install the app. If you tap the Pin / Image itself, it will also "app swap" you to the iOS App Store page.

Pinterest has provided no instruction on how to generate App Pins and pin iOS apps other than "You can also save your favourite Apps right from the App Store itself". Doing so via the App Stores Share button, only lets you Pin the not-so-great looking App icon to your Pinterest boards. The demo App boards which are hand picked by the Pinterest staff themselves seems to display a variety of pinned images / screenshots and not just the App icons. This seemed a little silly so I investigated further on how to get App Pins attached to images other than the App icons on the App store.

How to abuse Pinterest App Pins (developers)

So it turns out that in order for a Pinterest Pin to become an "App Pin" for an App Pin, all it needs is to have the Pin's URL link point to the web iTunes app store page.

I've made a test pin to show that this works here. It is a random image that I have pinned and pointed to the Instagram app page. Test it in your iOS Pinterest app.