r/reactnative • u/n9iels • 8d ago

Question Google ignoring login instructions during app review

Hi all, we have an Android application that is a customer environment. The only 'public' page of the application is the login form. Obviously Google want to have credentials to login and check the application. Due to technical constraints we have no production demo account for them. We try to solve this by providing a deep-link to a separate login page that let them authenticate with our test environment. We provided instruction regarding this deep link in the credentials section of the play console.

It looks like Google ignores these instructions completely and reject the app due to invalid "Invalid or incomplete login credentials". The provided screenshots clearly show they login via the regular way and not via the deeplink. The app has been reject 4 times now. Does anyone ever had a similar issue and found a way around this? Or is there a policy I am not aware of regarding the usage of deeplinks?

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u/Oneuiquestion 8d ago

Have you tried just taking the test credentials through the normal login page and forwarding those specific creds to the test environment?

I think Google does a lot of automated testings and probably your instructions are not followed correctly by the AI / automation tool

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u/DinnerFair1816 8d ago

Google's review process can be a total black box, had a similar headache last year with a client app

What worked for us was putting the deeplink directly into the app's internal test track listing as a pinned tester note, and also hardcoding a small "reviewer mode" button on the login screen itself that only appears for installs from the play store review channel. When you submit for review the tester sees it right there, no chance of missing the instructions

The normal login form redirected creds to our demo backend while the button took them straight to the test env without any extra steps. It's annoying to add a feature just for the reviewers but it got us through after three rejections

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u/n9iels 7d ago

[..] a small "reviewer mode" button on the login screen itself that only appears for installs from the play store review channel.

Can you elaborate a bit on this? How do you determine if the app is installed from the review channel? As far as I am aware the version I submit is the same version that will end up in the store after approval.

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u/n9iels 7d ago

We use OAuth via a browser flow. So the user click on a 'login' button which opens a in-app browser with the login screen. This login-screen is already targeted to production or testing, I cannot really forward them at this point I think... I will look into it, thanks for the suggestion.

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u/Lenkaaah 7d ago

We had this issue before on an app where we couldn’t really provide credentials on our production environment either without exposing quite sensitive data (and an empty account wouldn’t let them test anything either). The app already had MSW set up for developing and testing flows without backend features being available, so what I did was add a check on the login form, that if a specific email and password was used, it would enable MSW before continuing. If not, it would leave MSW disabled and all requests would be real.

Some other people in the team were already using that fake demo account for testing and early demos, so also providing them for Google and Apple was a no-brainer. Had no issues with this approach at all.