Having an embedded browser in a react native app, OKTA redirects the 90% of the times to "UserHome"

Questions
1

Hi, I am developing a cross-mobile app using React Native.
I am pointing to a SharePoint site and in order to authenticate there I am going through Microsoft Entra ID and Okta authentication.
The redirects are working well (from SharePoint, if user not logged, goes to Microsoft authentication then to Okta, but 9 times out of 10, after accepting the Okta MFA, it redirects to “okta..com/app/UserHome” instead of the SharePoint URL.
The flow outside my app is good 100% of the times, meanwhile inside the app there is always this issue.
Few things to keep into consideration:

  • I’ve noticed that when the flow works, it does few token redirects (https://okta..com/login/token/redirect?) and then goes to Sign in to your account and then to SharePoint (all good!) meanwhile when the flow goes bad, it happens to try to open directly the UserHome URL.
  • It seems that if I run the app in debug mode (and console opened) it seems to work more times, like 50% of the times, suggesting some kind of timing issues maybe? redirecting is too fast sometimes?
  • I tried to manipulate URL loading/blocking on onShouldStartLoadWithRequest/onNavigationStateChange but cannot manage the issue properly.

I am using “react-native-webview”: “^13.12.4”.

2

How are you handling primary authentication within your application? Do you open a webview and redirect the user to login with Okta via an /authorize request?

3

Yes, I have a redirect to

https://login.microsoftonline.com/'request data’

Then it goes to:

https://okta.‘site-domain’.com/app/office365/‘request data’

4

So you route users directly over to microsoft to authenticate? You don’t use an SSO URL to log the users into the target application?

What kind of application are you working on? Does it implement OIDC?

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