Expo Router auth guards that survive expired sessions and deep links

UpdatedSeptember 6, 2026

Most Expo apps get sign-in working on the first day and get auth guards wrong for the next six months. The login screen appears, the token lands in secure storage, and everything looks fine until a user reopens the app from a push notification, lands on a protected screen with an expired session, and sees a flash of someone else's layout — or worse, a blank screen with no way back.

Expo Router gives you the primitives to handle all of this: protected routes, layout-level redirects, and splash screen control that waits for async session restore. The official authentication guide covers the happy path well.

This is an excerpt. Read the full post at otf-kit.dev/blog/expo-router-auth-guards-production — full-stack kits your AI coding agent can actually ship to production. Browse the kits →

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