question

UncleFegg asked Nov 13, '14

iOS GameCircle Enabled Apps Rejected?!?

We have had one of our apps rejected for using GameCircle this week and so far have not been able to get Apple to budge. The issue was reported back in 2013 it seems (via google search on the subject.) Apple Say: "Since the GameCircle functionality within your app requires the user to leave the game in order to sign in or create an account, it may be a poor experience for the user. The user should be able to create an account or log in without being sent outside the app to Safari." In short GC should be using a WebView inside the app rather than branching out to Safari. Anyone got a workaround for this one or have we just missed some update that resolves it?

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Nick Gardner answered Dec 19, '14

Hi, I'm sorry, but the GameCircle plugin for iOS is no longer supported.

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UncleFegg answered Mar 14, '15

Brilliant. Perhaps you need to adjust the documentation and API to remove it. What sort of answer is that?

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UncleFegg answered Mar 14, '15

We've got live products running this that we can't update. It's not a 2 min job to rip-out all this work. Can't we have a way to stop the login pop-up and just use the local "guest" version until you get around to using an Apple approved way to login? Seems a bit daft to drop support rather than fix. We are going to have to write a proxy GameCircle back-end.

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UncleFegg answered Mar 14, '15

We need a way to at least load-up the local saved WhisperSync data so we can migrate to a new save system. We can't do that without login and we run the risk Apple will reject the app update during submission. It's Catch-22. Is there anyone on the technical side we can contact about this migration issue for existing live iOS apps. Players have a ton of saved stats that we need to get at in some form.

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DougM@Amazon answered Mar 19, '15

Hello UncleFegg, Unfortunately that would be pretty difficult as Whispersync would be base per customer. If it was before 2/1/2015, I would have suggested trying an update to your iOS application and then migrate the game data from Whispersync for games to another platform. However, as there is now a 64 bit binary requirement for all iOS applications and GameCircle is a 32 bit library, that will fail not just for the Safari authorization flow, but for not having a 64 bit binary available as your build would fail for 64 bit since the GameCircle framework does not support that architecture. It is an unfortunate situation but we don't really see a way around it given that Apple's policies have already come into effect it certainly hinders the idea of a migration path.

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UncleFegg answered Mar 27, '15

I've been doing this 20 years and there is always a way. We are not talking a few installs here, we've got over 300K to patch up or we can never upgrade our game on iOS. We were contacted direct by Amazon Games to do this work as a favour. Now we have no paddle. You are telling me that we can't have a 64bit version that does not show that login requester, that you can ignore anyway. We need one access to the local data, I don't care about the cloud data. I'd rather our players lost a few stats than had the game reset on them. Can I suggest I get a technical programer who is working on WhisperSync and get to the bottom of this. Feels like Amazon have taken a pretty lazy view of this. A migration route for us poor iOS 64bit people to get our Data back seems like a no-brainer.

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UncleFegg answered Mar 27, '15

and I did note your technical difficulties but only you have a way to read local data cache for the guest. I also read a post from another Amazon guy saying there are 64bit built libs. I'm not saying it's a 10 minute job either. Rest assured we'll never bother you again once we can read it and save again. We've given you our data...we want it back.

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UncleFegg answered Mar 27, '15

Happy to take this offline if it helps. Just desperate to not lose Players stats :( Even prior to Feb 64bit D-Day we couldn't submit a quick version as Apple rejected our last one due to the login.

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