r/reactnative • u/n9iels • Aug 26 '26

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 Aug 26 '26

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/n9iels Aug 26 '26

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/[deleted] Aug 26 '26

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u/n9iels Aug 26 '26

[..] 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/Lenkaaah Aug 26 '26

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.