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