Signed In With Google, Then Asked to Confirm Your E-mail

Tap "Continue with Google", pick your account, and the next thing you should see is ToRun. What a lot of people saw instead was a page asking them to go and confirm their e-mail address — the same address Google had just verified on their behalf, thirty seconds earlier.

We found it by counting. Since the rule that you must have a confirmed address to sign in went live, more than a quarter of the accounts created through Google never signed in at all: no session, ever, not once. They made an account and bounced off a wall.

Why it happened

The framework we use confirms an address automatically on one branch only — the flow where a person types a verification code during registration. That branch is switched off for us, because a social sign-up has nothing to type a code into. So every Google or Apple completion created an unconfirmed account, sent a confirmation link to the mailbox the provider had already vouched for, and redirected to the confirmation page without signing anyone in.

Nothing failed. No error was logged. The page even looked like a reasonable thing to show someone.

There was a safeguard for exactly this situation, added weeks earlier, and it never fired once — because it lives on the login page, and both Google buttons go through a different route entirely.

Born confirmed

An account created with Google or Apple now starts confirmed, as long as the address being registered is the one the provider actually asserted. If the provider explicitly says it has not verified the address, that trust is withheld and the old flow runs. If confirming fails for any reason, the old flow runs too, and the link is sent.

The confirmation mail the framework would have fired is answered with silence rather than sent, so nobody receives an e-mail asking them to confirm something that is already confirmed.

The address itself is now read-only on the completion page, with one line in all 29 languages explaining that the provider verified it. And on the phone, going from registration to the verification screen resets the stack, so a back gesture lands on the login screen rather than on a half-submitted form with the username and address still editable.

Nobody needs to be repaired

Accounts stuck behind the old wall need no migration. Their next tap on "Continue with Google" confirms them, which has been true since an earlier fix and is now the whole of the recovery path.

The check that should have caught this — the one that reads the sign-in paths and asserts each one behaves — had been green for four weeks while this was broken, because every hook it looks at lives on a page this flow never touches. It has twelve new checks on the pages that do.