Tinder Follows Industry Giants with Release of New Open-Source Tool on GitHub for iOS

Tinder, the dating app that took the world by storm in 2016, is also making its name within the web developer community. Last week, Tinder released its newest code repository, Layout, an open-source tool that simplifies defining user interfaces with code for iOS apps.

“Since the Tinder iPhone app has been primarily built with UIKit, and we wanted to make it as easy as possible for our engineers to define UI layouts, we developed a new high fidelity DSL syntax, called Layout, to easily visualize the screens the code represents,” wrote Christopher Fuller, one of Tinder’s iOS developers.

Fuller explains in the blog post that with Layout, developers can build “the best-in-class user interface that our users expect each time they open the app,” with key highlights including less verbose code, ease-of-use, and flexibility with Apple’s Auto Layout capabilities.

From visualizers to spell checkers, Tinder has released several tools and projects, with its current count at 18. But it’s not the only company that is actively contributing to the tech community: Twitter, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and LinkedIn have also released open-source projects and tools.

Tinder’s decision to open-source its tools may reflect a larger industry shift where open-source software (OSS) is no longer only for hobbyists. In fact, GitHub’s developer base skyrocketed from 2.8 million in 2012 to more than 94 million by 2022.

Traditionally, having proprietary code was a competitive advantage — a company’s secret ingredient to its formula — but today, millions of developers and a growing number of companies recognize OSS as the key to innovation.

Another interesting note is how AI and OSS relate. For example, AI models are often trained on open-source code, including Meta’s LLaMA, DeepSeek-R1, and Allen Institute’s Tülu 3. With this in mind, we may be witnessing the beginning of major industry transformations.

As more companies share their tools, large language models (LLMs) improve, making development faster (and more accurate). And, of course, AI is a welcome partner in taking away those tedious tasks, such as code reviews and bug detection.

But Tinder’s latest open-source release isn’t just about giving back to the community; it could be a larger strategic move. Layout is open for modification, welcoming any developers who may have suggestions.

“Tinder’s release of Layout as open-source is a great opportunity, and I hope Tinder will bring that opportunity to fruition,” said Alya Abbott, COO of Zulip.

Abbott points to how, when Twitter released its Bootstrap UI library in 2011, thousands of businesses built their web applications on top of it.

“This produced tons of goodwill for Twitter, and likely helped it hire and retain world-class engineers,” Abbott said.

It’s not only a clever way to find the best of the best, but perhaps it also strengthens Tinder’s position — and, subsequently, trust — in a different market.

Still, some of this seems too good to be true. Why are major companies so willing to share their repositories? How do they know competitors won’t use their code against them?

Take DeepSeek’s recent news, for example: In January, DeepSeek’s R1 model made waves by outperforming OpenAI’s ChatGPT in coding tasks. Just days later, OpenAI accused it of using a technique called distillation, where a student model is trained on the predictions of a teacher model.

“AI can do this by asking millions of questions, and they can essentially mimic the reasoning process that they learn from the parent model. And they can kind of suck the knowledge out of the parent model,” explained David Sacks, the White House’s AI and crypto “czar.”

It’s against OpenAI’s terms of service, which prohibits reverse engineering, decompiling, or discovering source code.

The same can be said for other OSS code. Parts of it may be legally protected by patents, copyrights, and terms of use.

As mentioned previously, letting likeminded devs suggest modifications saves a ton on development costs. Essentially, Tinder is getting advice for free from some of the best in the industry.

It’s not a foolproof plan, but since open-source is fluid, it’s only a matter of time before improvements emerge.

Tinder’s move could undoubtedly inspire other non-tech companies to embrace open-source. But Abbott implores companies willing to share their code — like Tinder or Twitter — to go beyond the initial publishing.

“Building a true open-source community is a major commitment, and publishing the code is just the beginning,” Abbott told us. “To truly make the project useful to folks outside of Tinder, the team at Tinder will need to develop public documentation, respond to reported bugs and community feature requests, review community pull requests, and answer questions.”

It’s a fair point. A single issue for Layout was raised in November but sat unanswered until last week. And GitHub’s 2017 Open Source Survey showed incomplete or confusing documentation is the biggest problem for open-source users.

There’s room for forgiveness. Tinder’s community is relatively small. With only 18 repositories and Fuller as the sole dev, there’s pretty limited community engagement, contributions, and documentation. Its Layouts tool remained mainly untouched since its release last February, although it’s picking up again after the recent updates.

“While it looks like Tinder hasn’t started their community-building efforts around this project so far, I hope that this is just the beginning, and they will be able to do the work to truly make this project useful outside their company,” Abbott said.

We’ve seen how Tinder built a dating empire on seamless user experience. The question now is whether it can bring that same level of commitment to its open-source projects.