The Technologies behind Tinder's Success

Last year Tinder became the most profitablenon-gaming application in the world. High-quality dating services have always gained a good customer base, but it was Tinder who managed to bring the dating to a whole new level. We tried to figure out which technologies can bring together 30 billion pairs in one application.

Location Security Tinder

Security is the most important part of the application.On the one hand, Tinder finds people nearby, but at the same time, it is impossible to determine the exact location of a person. In 2013, hackers could useTinder to determine the exact location, but the vulnerability was fixed by rounding the distance to kilometers and two more innovations.

The first of them is dividing the city into squaresapproximately 1×1 mile. When calculating the distance between the owners of matching accounts, the location of the target is snapped to the center of the current grid square. It then calculates the approximate distance between you and that anchored location.

The second innovation is our own formula fordistance calculations, the details of which are unknown. Taken together, the innovations have meant that there is no way to locate a target with greater accuracy than the boundaries of one of the 1 x 1 mile grid squares. The security of Tinder's geolocation is not in question and every user can be sure that their exact address cannot be determined using the application. We also note that geolocation processing, map creation and visualization are implemented using the Mapbox service.

Tinder platforms and programming languages

In addition to linking your account by geolocation, the applicationstands out for two features: a unique algorithm for selecting a soul mate and a convenient swiping process. The algorithm and mechanics of the mobile application are written in Objective-C, JAVA and C#. Huge database of client profiles and photos created via MongoDB and Redis. AWS Mobile platform was used for testing. 

The most important part of such applications isdata protection. In Tinder, it is implemented through SSL certificates from GoDaddy. Among programming languages, there are also JavaScript and HTML5 for the official site.

The technical stack consists of the following products:

• Amazon Route53 (scalable cloud-based domain name system web service.
• Amazon Elastic Load Balancing (distributes traffic with changing load in the same availability zone or between multiple availability zones).
• Amazon Mobile Hub (responsible for a diverse set of application features).
• Amazon EC2 (scalable computing resources in the cloud).

Developers are actively resorting to third-partyapplications. For example, Crashlytics and Rollbar are used to collect and analyze crashes and other application statistics. Tinder also uses Apteligent (testing), Cloudflare (caching and distributing data across platforms), Evident.io (cloud security) and New Relic (health monitoring). 

How Tinder selects Super Like accounts

You can't go anywhere without artificial intelligence. "Super like" function works with the help of AI, which selects the most suitable candidates. 

During the next “swipe”the user is shown four accounts that are selected by the AI ​​based on the user’s previous preferences. You can give one of these accounts a “super like,” which will triple the chance of a match. In general, the function was added only for additional income from the application, but we could not miss the presence of AI in Tinder.

Marketing and customer support

We figured out the inside, now we turnattention to the wrapper. Services for promoting the application and working with clients are no less important than the technical aspects. Customer service in Tinder is implemented through Ethnio and Zendesk, and the marketing part is given to Amazon SES, Mailgun, SendGrid services. The design of the project is written in Adobe Typekit, Blossom, Google Fonts and Sketch. Analytics processing is the responsibility of Google Analytics. Greenhouse is engaged in recruiting and recruiting staff, and productivity and accounting are submitted for processing in G Suite and Google Drive.