Google+ sign in for iOS9

Question

We have an app that uses Google+ sign in (version 1.7.1)

We are upgrading to iOS 9 and face some issues. Looking in google docs we can not find any explicit reference to those issues + we see that the library was not updated lately.

• Did google stopped supporting Google+ sign in ?
• Is there a valid way to support Google+ sign in iOS 9.0 or should we move to Google sign in?

The main problem is that we can not find any official reference for this issue.

(We did found this - https://code.google.com/p/google-plus-platform/issues/detail?id=1220) but no official answer.

Thaks

Answer 1

Google is going through massive migration for sign-in infrastructure, and deprecating lot of old technologies. Look at this link for overview https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/auth-migration

However generally there is no mention that they are deprecating Google+ Sign in.

But for iOS, lately all their attention has gone into Google Sign in SDK. (Google+ sign in 1.7.1 was updated in 2014), but Google Sign in was updated two weeks ago (Sept 15).

Overall i think Google wants people to move to just Google Sign in (If use case is just sign in and not using other features of Google+), without actually talking about it, in a big way, since that might mean they are publicly claiming that Google+ is a failure. Also the documentation contains a link to migrate from Google+ Sign for iOS also. https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/ios/quick-migration-guide

Hence my recommendation is using Google Sign in for iOS https://developers.google.com/identity/sign-in/ios/start-integrating

Google have done some interesting changes for iOS 9, including support of Safariviewcontroller. Which no longer requires installation of Google App for central sign in credential sharing. Since it routes it via Safariviewcontroller (Internally using Safari state, cookies etc).

We are using the latest SDK (2.3.0) with iOS 9 and 8 and it seems to be working well.

For the issue you have mentioned, Currently bitcode support for Google SDKs for iOS is probably in works. And multiple issues have been filed for different SDKs. Probably lastest 2.3.0 sdk is bitcode compliant, but I have no way to check since we are also using some other libraries which yet needs some updating. But this has not been show stopper for us since we can disable bitcode for short term (We can afford to do that since we are not developing for WatchOS yet which requires bitcode enabled flag as mandatory flag). And hopefully in near future Google will make all SDKs bitcode compliant.