Techies have found ways to hack Tinder in order to automatically like every woman on the dating app.
Former Microsoft developer Yuri de Souza wrote a blog about how he reverse engineered the network traffic to swipe right every girl on Tinder in a continuous loop.
In his post, Hacking Tinder for Fun and Profit, De Souza said:
“I played around with Tinder one lazy Sunday afternoon and recalled my friend telling me how he would spend hours swiping right on Tinder just to accumulate as many matches as possible. This had me thinking, why can’t I reverse engineer Tinder and automate the swipes? After all, I’m pretty darn good at taking things apart!”
De Souza, gives detailed information on how he performed the Tinder hack, with step by step instructions:
“Tinder like most internet connected mobile apps, uses an HTTP based API under the hood. To reverse engineer the network traffic, we need to capture it and understand it. My tool of preference for capturing HTTP traffic is Fiddler. One of Fiddler’s cooler features is its ability to decrypt secure traffic over HTTPS. It does this using a “man-in-the-middle” approach to intercept the secure packets. To the client (the mobile app) Fiddler impersonates the API web server. And, to the API web server, Fiddler impersonates the client (the mobile app).”
When he posted the blog on Hacker News, people responded with their own Tinder hacks.
One of the replies, from a user called tinderbot, gives instructions on how to create bots for Tinder, referencing the Castle Clash bot that appeared on the app earlier in the year.
“tinderbot is a node module which allows you to develop ‘bots’ which interact on the Tinder dating app. It provides an easy to use mechanism for retrieving your Facebook access tokens which are used to authorize your bot for interacting with the Tinder apis, and exposes a hook for checking for Tinder updates, chatting with matches, etc.
“Below is a simple bot which periodically ‘likes’ all matches nearby and tells them to play Castle Clash.”
Another programmer, Venkatesh Nandakumar, offers his hack, which aims to eliminate the “upper hand” women have in online dating by automating the app.