Tinder

Tinder has announced a partnership with language learning platform Duolingo to offer lessons to its users and bridge the language barrier gap for long-distance dates.

The Match Group dating app has offered to give 100,000 users a free month of Duolingo Plus, an online service which offers lessons in multiple languages. According to Tinder, 76 percent of its users who wanted to match with people from other countries found that they were matching with dates who spoke languages other than their own, a barrier to connection. Tinder saw an opportunity to help them with Duolingo.

Image: Tinder

Tinder has formed a new partnership with ride sharing app Lyft to offer its users the ability to gift rides from within the app.

The popular dating app announced in a press release that it will be rolling out the new feature where users can gift their dates a Lyft ride directly without having to leave the app. (Lyft already allows its users to book rides for others, so it extends this ability to Tinder.) The partnership comes on the heels of a new surge of interest from its users to meet each other in person again after a year of lockdowns from coronavirus. Tinder wanted to make it easier for users to stay on the app while planning and meeting their dates.

Match Group’s star dating app noted that additional features of its partnership with Lyft will be rolled out in the future, including exclusive perks for members, though it didn't specify what these features or perks would be. Tinder also noted that its users can take advantage of Lyft’s safety features now, including “the ability to share their location with family and friends and silently request assistance through Emergency Help, supported by ADT.” 

Tinder has announced it will bring back its popular paid premium feature Passport for free, but only for a limited time. The promotion advocates for users to take advantage and enjoy “fantasy flings” while they can. 

Passport lets users to set their current location to any zip code or city in the world, allowing them to match with users in the same areas. The feature is usually a paid premium service, but Passport will be free for all users during the month of April according to CNet. 

The company said of the promotion: "it could be a way of testing the international waters while [users] wait for a vaccine passport.”

Tinder and Everywell are giving away Covid Tests

To prepare for a surge of daters looking to meet in person, Tinder is giving away free at-home Covid test kits. The kits will be distributed on a first-come, first-served basis, and will be offered on March 20th at 7pm EST – the first day of spring.

In partnership with Everlywell, the maker of federally approved Covid-19 test kits, Tinder will give 1,000 kits to people (500 couples) who have made plans to meet up, according to CNN. The kits come with a nose swab, which you use and return back to the lab to wait for results to post online, usually 1-2 days later. 

The popular dating app company said that 40 percent of its customers under age 30 haven’t met in person because of fear of the coronavirus, so it’s hoping this will help ease some anxiety.

Garbo is a non-profit provider of Background Checks

Tinder announced that it will offer background checks on potential dates, a new measure that parent company Match Group has taken to improve safety for users of the app. Currently no dating app conducts criminal background checks on users, so this is a huge step forward for safety advocates.

Match Group has partnered with Garbo, a non-profit that provides background checks, and plans to debut an in-app background check feature on Tinder later this year according to The Washington Post. There are no details yet on the cost of the service.

Tracey Breeden, Match’s new head of safety and social advocacy, said in an interview: “This gives [Tinder users] an opportunity and that comfort level. Maybe they want more information before they have a video chat, maybe they want more information before they meet in person.”

If you’ve been vaccinated, you might want to include it in your online profile. Several online dating apps have now reported seeing increased interest around the topic of vaccines.

According to a report from Vice in early March, a Tinder spokesperson told Motherboard that they’d seen a 238 percent increase in vaccine mentions in user bios in January, and noticed the interest surrounding the subject as early as November. Bumble also reported an increase in the number of people using the words “vaccine” or “vaccinated” in their profiles dating back to December. In the same time period, the number of profiles on Scruff with the word “vaccinated” added has doubled.