Cordova session cookies don't work on Android Lollipop

Question

I develop a Cordova/Phonegap app for Android which uses session cookies to login to third party websites. For this, I do an AJAX post request (with jQuery) and then cookies are set automatically.

But, when I updated my smartphone to Android Lollipop 5.0 and also the app libraries to API level 21, cookies stopped working. What has changed?

Answer 1

After hours spent looking on the Internet for a working solution, I came across an article that explains the issue really well, so I am posting it here because I thought it will be useful to other Stack Overflow users.

Basically, the problem lies on the new Android third party cookies policy (https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-5.0-changes.html#BehaviorWebView), which blocks them by default.

The solutions is to add a few lines of code to the main activity:

public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
    super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
    super.init();

    // Allow third party cookies for Android Lollipop
    if (Build.VERSION.SDK_INT >= Build.VERSION_CODES.LOLLIPOP) {
        WebView webView = (WebView)super.appView;
        CookieManager cookieManager = CookieManager.getInstance();
        cookieManager.setAcceptThirdPartyCookies(webView,true);
    }

    super.loadUrl(Config.getStartUrl());
}

For more information, I put a link to the full article here: http://joashpereira.com/blog/2014/11/19/fix-to-cordovaphonegap-apps-targeting-android-5-lollipop-or-later-on-default-disallowing-third-party-cookies/