Tinder Hacks

There are lots of sites and blogs that promise to help you ‘hack’ Tinder. A Google search throws up seven million results, ranging from inane to creepy to hilarious. Some people, like Blake Jamieson who runs TinderHacks.com, make a living helping others Tinder harder, better, faster and stronger.

But all of these, with the possible exception of this inventive prank, aren’t really hacks. Some people might find them helpful, but they don’t really do anything you can’t do through the app. Even the auto-swiping scripts are not really that different from this revolving meat swiper.

Are there any real Tinder hacks?

Automating Tinder

I like meeting new people. I don’t like spending time endlessly swiping profiles or making an instant judgement about people I haven’t spoken to. But almost everyone my age is on Tinder, and it’s one of the easiest ways to meet new people. So, inspired by Rob Rhinehart’s High Frequency Dating post and a personal resolution to either do things properly or not at all, I got myself a Tinder account and wrote a script that would automatically ‘like’ everyone within my area.

This turned out to be fairly easy — lots of people have done this before me and code to do this is readily available online. Here’s one public project that accesses Tinder functionality through Python. (When I showed a friend a draft of this post he told me about Tools For Tinder, which is a ready-made app that does exactly this!)

The script I wrote would run a few times a day and would send me an email with any matches I got. I could then start a conversation with them and arrange to meet up.

Why Does Tinder Allow This?

This adds a lot of noise to the already over saturated world of online dating, so why does Tinder let people do this? Well, they don’t exactly. The way this works is that if you can intercept the messages sent between your phone and Tinder’s servers, you can have your computer mimic your phone’s behaviour. If this is done properly, Tinder thinks the messages you’re sending from your computer are actually coming from a phone running the app. (If you’re interested in the technical details, this article gives an introduction.)

Looking into these messages lets you see what’s happening behind the scenes in the Tinder app. Once you’ve figured that out you can do things like create a loop that sends ‘like’ messages over and over again.

This is useful, but it only gets you the first step of the way — it gets you some matches. A lot of matches go nowhere! In order to get someone’s attention it’s important to send a good first message.

TMI — The Secret To A Good First Message

The Tinder app shows everyone’s age. This works by sending the match’s birth date (as taken from Facebook) to the user’s phone, which then calculates the number of years between today’s date and their date of birth.

This means that though the app displays everyone’s age, going behind the scenes actually lets you see their date of birth!

So you can, hypothetically, do something like this: