mobile - Single Sign On authentication in IOS requires LinkedIn App

Question

We've migrated to the latest LinkedIn IOS SDK which only supports single sign-on (SSO) authentication, in conjunction with the official LinkedIn mobile application. Our app works really well with this, however Apple will not approve our latest version, because it requires the LinkedIn app to be installed for the authentication to work.

We need a solution which handles the scenario when the LinkedIn app is not present, to use web authentication, however LinkedIn are very specific stating Mobile SDK-enabled applications require the official LinkedIn iOS app to be installed on the device to function properly" https://developer.linkedin.com/docs/ios-sdk - The Mobile SDK was released in July, so presume we are not alone in having our app rejected by Apple approvals.

Answer 1

Could you test for the presence of the linked-in app:

• if it is not there: implement OAuth2 directly through your app
• if it is there: use it or your OAuth2 implementation (which you'd probably err on the side of using their app for the link-ability between any features of the app you may need in yours).

Thereby avoiding the REQUIREMENT to have the app installed.

Researching for this I did find:

Mobile vs server-side access tokens

Presently, there is no mechanism available to exchange them. If you require tokens that can be used in both the mobile and server-side environment, you will need to implement a traditional OAuth 2.0 solution within your iOS environment to acquire tokens that can be leveraged in both situations.

from: https://developer.linkedin.com/docs/ios-sdk-auth

which suggests that authentication away from the app is supported.