Cookie based authentication issues aggregation

Environment

[skip envinfo]

Reproducible Demo

Provided in corresponding issues

Description

Issues closed while still open. Cookie based authentication is at this moment not usable. This is partially due to the following issues:

• https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/23005 //TL;DR can only ever work with one cookie on Android
• https://github.com/facebook/react-native/issues/929 //TL;DR redirect: 'manual' doesnt work

These issues have been closed even though they are still open and very relevant.
There's more around cookies/fetch that i will try to hunt down in the following days. E.g one of the two platforms, i believe iOS , wont store cookies after app restart.

Conclusion

In general cookie based authentication is very problematic on multiple levels. If cookie based authentication is claimed implied to be supported on React Native and developers unknowingly structure their architecture around this these issues need attention. Otherwise people need to know before implementing a project using such an authentication mechanism as dozens of hours could be spend working on an architecture that is inevitably simply not supported.

This is not a matter of pointing fingers or demanding features. It is currently unfortunately misleading to leave people unaware of all these limitations as they might set out to create an architecture that's unsupported as i have.

At the very least maybe we should revise the documentation of fetch and explain how some things like "redirect:manual" dont work right now.

Start by reviewing linked issues 23005 and 929, then inspect the React Native fetch documentation and the reported Android and iOS cookie behavior. The issue has no single acceptance criterion: done would require either resolving the described cookie and redirect limitations or documenting those limitations clearly, including restart behavior.