How to stay logged in to TweetDeck in iOS standalone mode

I love TweetDeck. It’s great to have on an iPad in your lap while following some live event on TV, like a political debate, a press conference, breaking news, or an Apple keynote.

There is no iOS TweetDeck app anymore, unfortunately, but if you add it to your home screen from Safari, it works as a standalone app, separate from the main instance of Safari.

But recently, I was logged out of my TweetDeck standalone app, and trying to log back in just bounces me over to Safari rather than keeping me in the app, so it’s rendered useless.

The solution to this (for anybody Googling with the same problem) is to copy two cookies from Safari into TweetDeck using Safari’s developer tools. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to do that.

• Log into TweetDeck in Safari on your iPad.
• Plug your iPad into your Mac and open Safari there, too.
• In Safari’s settings on your Mac, under the “Advanced” tab, check “Show Develop menu in menu bar”.
• Click the “Develop” menu, and you should see the name of your iPad as as menu item; click it, then click “tweetdeck.twitter.com” in the submenu.
• Web Inspector will open. Click the “Storage” tab, make sure “All Storage” is selected, then click “Cookies” in the left sidebar.
• The two cookies we need are auth_token and twid. Copy their values by right-clicking them and clicking “Copy Row” and pasting into Notes or something.

• Open the TweetDeck standalone app on your iPad.
• Click the “Develop” menu in Safari on your Mac again, click the name of your iPad, then click “tweetdeck.twitter.com” in the submenu.
• Web Inspector will open again, this time inspecting the standalone Safari instance that’s running TweetDeck. Click the “Storage” tab, make sure “All Storage” is selected, then click “Cookies” in the left sidebar.
• First you need to delete all existing cookies; do this by right-clicking each cookie and clicking “Delete”.
• Now create the two cookies you copied from Safari in TweetDeck by pasting the following JavaScript into the command line in the “Console” tab of Web Inspector, substituting your values for auth_token and twid, but keeping the domain and expires values as-is:

document.cookie="auth_token=abcdef1234567890;domain=twitter.com;expires=Fri, 31 Dec 9999 23:59:59 GMT";
document.cookie="twid=\"u=12345678\";domain=twitter.com;expires=Fri, 31 Dec 9999 23:59:59 GMT";

• Hit Cmd+r to reload TweetDeck, and you should be all set.