Android to PHP session without cookies

so far, I have been able to use the HttpURLConnection class in java to make an app that can GET the form of my php website, put in the proper login details (username, password) and POST them back. I have double checked this with the response codes and am getting 200 for both GET and POST.

I'm having an issue now accessing the page that a successful login should redirect to. It is to my understanding that after a POST or GET, the connection is terminated once the response code is requested. My attempts to get the response cookies while logging in produce a "null" cookie.

The PHP site I am accessing does not seem to have any response cookies after a login when using "inspect element" in Chrome. Regardless of this, I have tried accessing the cookies all sorts of ways with no such luck. The request cookie header is there when I go the the website.

Am I missing something and the cookies are actually there? Or is it possible that the site does not use cookies to maintain a session? If that's the case, how would I access the page I want after logging in on my Android app?

Response Headers
    Cache-Control:no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0
    Connection:Keep-Alive
    Content-Encoding:gzip
    Content-Length:23030
    Content-Type:text/html; charset=utf-8
    Date:Mon, 10 Aug 2015 23:03:26 GMT
    Expires:Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT
    Keep-Alive:timeout=15, max=100
    Pragma:no-cache
    Server:Apache/2.2.22 (Debian)
    Vary:Accept-Encoding
    X-Powered-By:PHP/5.4.4-14+deb7u11



Request Header
Accept:text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding:gzip, deflate
Accept-Language:en-US,en;q=0.8
Cache-Control:max-age=0
Connection:keep-alive
Content-Length:52
Content-Type:application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Cookie:__utma=83554121.1278939357.1435860313.1435944069.1438202297.3; __utmc=83554121; __utmz=83554121.1438202297.3.3.utmcsr=google|utmccn=(organic)|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=(not%20provided); _ga=GA1.2.1278939357.1435860313; PHPSESSID=4q03j4ihb7trnm1pvvofc9f3f5
Host:WEBSITE
Origin:WEBSITE
Referer:WEBSITE
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests:1
User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/44.0.2403.130 Safari/537.36

via Chebli Mohamed