Over the past few years, Google has made policy changes that limited how apps can integrate with Drive/Sheets with the goal of improving user safety and security. We were hopeful a change wouldn’t affect the Google Drive/Sheets integration immediately but the risk of something like this happening was one of the reasons why we opted to deprecate the integration a year ago.
On February 21st, we received a notice from Google with a policy change affecting the usage of Google Drive/Sheets in older versions of ODK Collect. Collect will require a review to ensure it meets new policy requirements.
What’s happening now?
We have until May 21st (90 days) to pass this review. Our goal is to pass the review, but it is unlikely because as far as we understand, Google no longer allows the methods Collect used to access Google Drive/Sheets folders. If we fail review, old versions of Collect will stop being able to connect to Google Drive.
What do you need to do?
If you are still counting on older versions of Collect to connect to Google Drive/Sheets, we recommend starting to plan for an alternative now. If this review fails, the only way to get Google Drive/Sheets functionality will be to fork an old Collect version, use your own pre-release OAuth token that does not require review (limited to 100 users), and distribute your own Collect APKs.
We will share updates as soon as we get them.