Authenticating in iOS / Objective-C or React Native

I'm wondering if is any prior art for authenticating with the API using Objective-C. I'm currently in the process of building a mobile application in React Native. The current problem I'm having there is that according the spec a `XMLHttpRequest` needs to follow redirection by default and there is no way around it. So in order to authenticate I need to access the Objective-C side to retrieve the the required cookie headers. Has anyone authenticated using iOS before?