Tinder (app)
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Example of swiping within Tinder
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| Developer(s) | IAC |
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| Initial release | September 12, 2012 |
| Development status | Active |
| Operating system | iOS, Android |
| Website | www |
Tinder is a location-based social search mobile app (using Facebook) that facilitates communication between mutually interested users, allowing matched users to chat. The app is most commonly used as a dating app, but has branched out to provide more services, making it more of a general social media application.
Originally incubated inside Hatch Labs, the app was launched in 2012, and by 2014 it was registering about one billion "swipes" per day. Tinder is among the first "swiping apps", where the user uses a swiping motion to choose between the photos of other users: swiping right for potentially good matches and swiping left on a photo to move to the next one.
Tinder was founded by Sean Rad, Jonathan Badeen, Justin Mateen, Joe Munoz, Dinesh Moorjani, Chris Gylczynski, and Whitney Wolfe, who later left Tinder to start Bumble. Other sources state that list of founders is restricted to Mateen, Rad, and Badeen, though this has been disputed. Rad and Mateen had known each other since they were fourteen. They later attended USC together and entered the Internet entrepreneurship field. Rad has stated that the impetus for the app was his observation that "no matter who you are, you feel more comfortable approaching somebody if you know they want you to approach them." He believed that a "double opt-in" system could be created to potentially alleviate that stress. Rad has also stated that Tinder filled a gap for social sites for meeting strangers, rather than connecting with people a user already knows.
Tinder was then seeded at numerous college campuses, and expanded to other college campuses. The app won TechCrunch's Crunchie Award for "Best New Startup of 2013". In March 2013, when the app was still used only in certain localities, social media director Alexa Mateen stated that the app was intended to be a "chance to meet people you wouldn't normally meet". By May 2013, Tinder was one of the top 25 social networking apps available on the web based on frequency of use and number of users. Initially, instead of a swiping motion, users would click on either a green "heart" or red "oXo" to select or move on from the photos shown. Tinder became the first new online dating service to become one of the top five utilized services on the web in about ten years.
As of October 2014, the app was processing over one billion swipes per day, producing about twelve million matches per day. The average user would generally spend about an hour and a half on the app each day. After transitioning from the clicking function Tinder initially used, Tinder became the first "swipe app", now a term to describe various apps that use swiping left or right to control what content the user sees in a browsing fashion. The functionality of the swipe is now in use by multiple other companies and software. In 2015, Tinder introduced the ability to go back to rejected profiles, "rewinding" if the user feels they made a mistake—something previously not possible on the app.
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