Word of warning If you meet “the one”, merely removing the app from your phone won’t be enough to delete your profile – you will still be roaming the ether looking for love. Either person can make the first move to start a conversation on the app, so it is anyone’s game. Who will I meet? Tinder is where you are most likely to find anyone and everyone in your local area: the person you see on the train platform each morning who you swear wears a wedding ring the primary-school friend you lost touch with 15 years ago your boss or maybe your ex. Personal information can be as minimal as you want it to be, although men may want to be judicious in their use of dog pics: some users were accused of “dogfishing” – posing with furry friends in an effort to attract more dates – on the app. How do I use it? All you need to do is upload some (ideally well-lit) photos. Despite having added “super-likes” and paid-for profile consultancy, the app has become known for one simple reason: hooking up.
By 2015, however, Tinder had moved far beyond the campus and was registering a billion swipes on the app every day (left for “no”, right for “yes”), with users spending an average of 90 minutes a day scanning through their geographically defined options. What is it? The most popular and enduring of the first wave of dating apps, Tinder was founded in 2013 as a way to help US students meet each other in other words, a social network for friendship as well as dating. Photograph: SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images