How to run Tinder on your PC

If you are like me, and you don’t carry around a fancy touch screen smart phone such as an Iphone,  or a Galaxy, and you feel as if you are being left behind it terms of catching up with new dating methods and trends – then this is a post for you.

No doubt, Tinder is a new, fast and exciting way to get to know potential dating mates. Its GPS location feature along with its fast and simple visual interface makes it an ideal tool for people to have an opportunity to know a potential date who stands or sits next door to them, or at some coffee place right down the street. They might discover that there has been a beautiful “girl next door” all these years right under their nose…

As much as I wanted to catch up with the trend, I wasn’t going to buy a smartphone specifically for that reason (as one of my friends suggested). So I had to come up with another way to merge myself with this trend, and, I found it in the form of Bluestacks.

Bluestacks is an Android emulator which acts as a virtual machine platform for the Android OS and can be used under Windows operating system. Realizing this possibility, and being happy that someone really took upon him\herself the task of developing such a software, I installed it without hesitation. Of course, there is an alternative for Bluestacks and it is called Andy. I personally had difficulties installing Andy, specifically when it came to installing the Oracle VirtualBox. So I abandoned it in favor of Bluestacks.

Steps:

1.       Download Bluestacks from their official website

2.       Install Bluestacks on your PC

3.       Open Bluestacks, Create a new Google Play account or sign in through your existing one.

4.       Click “Search” on the top left corner of the screen

5.       Type “Tinder”, click enter

6.       Once you have been directed to the search results, click on the first option on the top left corner of the screen

7.       Click the green button that says “install”

After installing Tinder, you’d need to take care of the location issue:

Since Tinder is a location based app, it works with the GPS chip that is found in the smartphone itself. When installed on a “phantom smartphone”, that is, an emulator like Bluestacks, the GPS feature is none existent. Therefore, in order to bypass this issue and solve the problem, you would need to install a GPS spoofer software. That software gives latitude and longitude coordinates to the GPS location input in the Android OS running on Bluestacks. There are many available Apps that can do the explained above, personally, I installed an app called Fake GPS which is a simple solution to this method (even the name is catchy).

Steps:

1.       Go to google play

2.       Type “fake gps”

3.       Pick the first option on the left, called “fake gps”

4.       Install it by clicking the green button that says “install”

5.       Open Fake GPS

6.       Set your location – Fake Gps uses Google maps to pinpoint your location. You can manually hold your left mouse button and choose a specific spot on the world map, or, you can search an address on the search bar (I used this option).

7.       Once you picked a location click on the wide button at the top of the screen that says “set location”. Immediately after clicking it you’d see a little pop up balloon at the bottom right corner of your monitor that shows the chosen GPS location in longitude and latitude coordinates.

After taking care of the location issue – it is time to run Tinder!

An important note:

Users who don’t use English as a primary language in Tinder might have some difficulties typing using their PC QWERTY keyboard. This issue can be solved by downloading a different keyboard app for Android. I highly recommend the Go Keyboard app.

Pros:

1. saves the hassle and money of buying a new smartphone

Cons:

1. Tinder works a bit slowly on a PC (at least my PC)

2. Tinder takes a lot of RAM and somtimes it made my Intel GMA driver crash a few times