I’ve been working on reverse-engineering Grindr and creating an open source client implementation for it since March.
When GrindrPlus closed, my project turned out to be its de-facto successor and immediatelly several thousands of people started following it. Now it has 70k+ downloads on Forgejo and the authorship is dedicated to public domain :)
- MIT licensed, no ads, no analytics, no trackers, no diagnostics, no statistics, no telemetry, only opt-in updates checking
- Signed releases, reproducible builds on all four platforms, full transparency
- And it’s now in Google Play (for the time being) and being reviewed for F-Droid!
Already applied for Apple developer enrollment and going to publish this to EU alt stores as well as in the TestFlight. Then a classic unsigned ipa and also going to attempt Apple AppStore just for completeness.
You need an existing Grindr account. Downloads: https://opengrind.org/download
Questions and criticism welcome.
gayest and proudest 💅
i haven’t used grindr since 2012 – thanks for giving me an excuse to give it a try again. lol
The dudes are always hot and ready.
yes and not for me. lol
i’ve never had much success using apps – only in bottom buffets like horsemarketsf work for me :p
And occasionally bathed and sober!
Noice
I wish the straights were as dedicated as our homosexual bros.
Most problems with straight dating apps is too many guys and too little girls. So if someone is dedicated enough to make something like, they don’t have the reach to get to girls to sign up. Unless they are marketing minded, then they just wanna make money with their “idea”
Also, this may be wrong, but I expect far more men to be searching for an open source alternative than women. Not only is it harder to attract more women to the apps in general, and open source one is already targeting a market that I think is even more male dominated.
There are girls on grindr, both trans and cis. But… Are you really saying you expect there to be less dudes… on grindr?? It was originally just dudes - the literal opposite of less dudes lmao
Something about MIT licensed Grindr client tickles me lol. Great job!
I assume Google (on Grindr’s instructions) will take it down eventually, but I guess you’re prepared for that by trying to put it on F-Droid
KDE gonna start shipping with Krindr
And then expand to a Feeld client called “Kinky”
…I’ll see myself out
The recommended link to download is still https://opengrind.org/guides/download as well as Forgejo https://git.opengrind.org/open-grind/open-grind/releases
F-Droid is a backup for people who don’t want to egress to Open Grind infra (even though the promise not to log, analyze any IPs is legally binded by the Privacy Policy, but I understand them) or those who want to be sure every new release is reproducible (if they don’t trust Open Grind CI that verifies this automatically before each release).
Google Play is temporal listing that will get taken down soon, but it does add credibility.
awesome work.
tysm <3
i have actually been using this for a while now, found it on my own when i discovered grindr and grapheneos dont play nice, its been very cool so far, no complaints
Nice to hear that it works on GrapheneOS. If you do encounter any issues, please report them anywhere you want — Forgejo issues, Matrix chat, or even personally to me so I can relay them properly. I can’t test on GrapheneOS because don’t have a compatible device, but I assume many Open Grind users are running it on GrapheneOS.
did you figure out the problem between grindr and graphene?
Really I’m surprised decentralized, ad-free, non-surveillance gay dating apps aren’t a thing. A federated dating app could be amazing.
we have the majority of users struggling to register in Matrix to join the discussion chat. how many technically-skilled open gays (and queers) ready to publicly broadcast their sexual orientation & gender and the fact they’re dating as well as their full dating profile by self-hosting some decentralized dating server do you think on average are in each city in the world? maybe a handful in the most developed countries. I doubt there’ll be even a dozen in my city (Madrid) though
It wont be hard to out do the grindr app. I swear they’ve done zero optimizations throughout my years of using it.
I just showed this to my grindr user friend who is quite excited and is going to share it in the Portland Oregon community. He really appreciates the paywall/ad bypass.
Does something like this for heterosexual people exist? Like an open-source Tinder like app?
Guess I have to update my orientation to preserve my commitment to FOSS options.
This is the Gay Agenda the bible bashers have been warning me about…
Not that I know of. Tinder is pretty hard to reverse-engineer, Meta-levels of bot automation detection (where bot automation means anything that doesn’t go through their official client in a way they intended)
It would be nice if there was an integrated dating platform, so bi people could easily be in both major dating pools.
Maybe check Alovoa
It kind of sucks. At least in my area. I only get spam.
Just tried it out.
Works great so far.
Appreciate the not gatekeeping on the tags and people showing up like the official app does.
they are making opensource-things about anything these days
Should be the default!
there was a huge demand after grindrplus with hundreds of thousands of users got shutdown ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Send a link to Mike Johnson.
the lawyer?oh ok i got it 💀
How much work do you think would it be to also create a FOSS backend, maybe utilizing an existing xmpp server for federation?
Someone in the community already works on it. I personally don’t see a point in it — Grindr sucks in every way, all other apps are better experience-wise. Grindr is gay culture, mentioned in songs, memes, essentially every gay man in the world who has internet knows what Grindr is. 100 M profiles dating pool. It’s not realistic even for competitors to reach a fraction of this, let alone a federated social. And if you do know what federation, decentralization and XMPP are — why would you use a hookup app anyway instead of utilizing existing federation apps and social networks to find someone you like? ;)
Can’t wait to see the iOS release
I tried another third party Grindr client and my account got instantly banned, and the official app doesn’t support GrapheneOS. So not sure how to create an account.
For now you have to do that via the official app. You could attempt to register directly with raw APIs using https://git.opengrind.org/open-grind/grindr-api-dev-tool too, but it requires a reCAPTCHA enterprise token, which you have to mint somehow.
