Ionic Webview not syncing cookies on first launch IOS

Please help!! I’m using Ionic 5 with Angular and Cordova. My app works perfect when testing on browsers and Android devices but when it’s first installed on my device (iphone) through Xcode the cookies are not received or sent properly. My app uses cookie based authentication so when I get my login response it will have a cookie that should be sent with all subsequent requests. However, on the first launch after install I cannot login at all. When I exit and relaunch my app it works perfectly. I believe this is due to the webview not syncing cookies correctly. I have tried all the solutions in this post: https://github.com/Telerik-Verified-Plugins/WKWebView/issues/247 but the plugins are so outdated I can’t get it to work properly.

I have been looking for a solution for weeks and am completely stuck and exhausted at this point. I’m new to Ionic and development in general so any help would be greatly appreciated! I will provide whatever code or screenshots is helpful, just let me know what I should share.