iOS App rejection due to “Sign Up” button in auth login page

Question

Our iOS app "Files Pro" (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/files-pro/id285578660) includes support for Google Drive using the official Google SDK.

A few days ago our last update was rejected by the Apple review team because of the presence of the "Sign Up" button in the Google login authorisation page. According to Apple the presence of this button violates their guideline that:

"Apps that link to external mechanisms for purchases or subscriptions to be used in the app, such as a “buy” button that goes to a web site to purchase a digital book, will be rejected"

You may be aware that apps which use the Dropbox SDK were rejected a few months ago for the same reason. Dropbox resolved the problem by removing the "Sign Up" button from their login page for iOS clients.

We have temporarily worked around the problem ourselves. But we would like to know if Google plan to address this by removing the "Sign Up" button for iOS clients? Otherwise other iOS developers using the Google SDK are going to find their apps being rejected by Apple.

Answer 1

Ali, thanks for the response - we are pleased to hear you are working to resolve this issue.

Basically what we did to work-around this was to hide the button on the Google login web page by setting the "Sign Up" element's "display" style to "none". For full details please see our blog post:

http://olivetoast.com/blog/files/googledrive_skydrive_rejection.ot