Let me count the things I tried.
First, I followed the thread and set the UIDeviceFamily to 1
Second, I exported to Xcode to change the targeted device family. This was useless because the files exported from appery.io cannot be built in xcode because there is a syntax error in the cordova files.
Third, thinking I could directly make the changes necessary to the build files, I changes the TARGETED_DEVICE_FAMILY variable from "1,2" to just "1" in three placed in the project.pbxproj file.
None of these resulted in disabling ipad support. When I built and uploaded the ipa file to itunes, it still shows support for ipad. Since this isn't optimized for ipad it is going to get rejected again and waste another week of my life sitting in limbo waiting on Apple.
I need something that works. Please help.