# Expo Router auth guards that survive expired sessions and deep links

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.

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