If you submitted via Ingress only during the challenge, you will only receive Ingress rewards. I’m a PoGo only Wayfarer, so I only received PoGo rewards. If you submitted via both Ingress and PoGo during the challenge, you’d received rewards for both games.
From what it sounds like, you only submitted edits via Ingress and received only Ingress rewards, so your friend who tried to redeem them via PoGo couldn’t, because they aren’t for items used in PoGo, just Ingress. In the reward tiers, they even listed the different rewards for each game:
Each code also lists what game they are good for in the rewards email. This is how my PoGo only rewards email looks:
