How can I work around Google Accounts/Auth with Protractor & Webdriver? - angularjs

Question

Our application uses Google Accounts for authorisation/authentication and you typically access the app by doing the following:
Visit accounts.google.com or get redirected there
Sign into your account
Visit our application (assuming you previously accepted our apps permissions) and you are logged in
When I recreate these steps with Protractor (with either WebDriverJS, Chromedriver, selenium etc) by step 3. the browser has 'forgotten' that you were previously logged into your Google Account and our app prevents your access.
From what I understand, this is because each test uses a fresh browser instance, so after each Google accounts login/navigate to our app step (i.e. broswer.get('ourappurl.com');) the browser session is not preserved.
How can we re-use the browser so that this does not happen?
Note: I have already tried the --user-data-dir flag which has no effect. Also we are not using Karma or Jasmine and are using the Cucumber support provided by Protractor.
Example code:
this.Given(/^I'm logged into my Google Account$/, function (callback) {
var dvr = browser.driver;
dvr.get('https://accounts.google.com');
dvr.findElement(by.id('Email')).sendKeys('test.account#testaccount.com');
dvr.findElement(by.id('next')).click();
dvr.findElement(by.id('Passwd')).sendKeys('password');
dvr.findElement(by.id('signIn')).click().then(callback);
});
this.When(/^I navigate to our App$/, function (callback) {
browser.get('/').then(callback);
});
this.Then(/^I am logged in to our App$/, function (callback) {
checkUserLoggedIn().then(callback);
});