Recovering Tinder messages from users who've deleted their accounts

Okay, I've used Tinder.

However, we'll put that aside and get more technical here.

I ran into the situation where a person had given me some info to add her on Facebook, so that we could continue the conversation, but then deleted/disabled her Tinder account!

For those who don't know, Tinder will remove such a person from your matches and you cannot look at the conversation history anymore. Well, that sucks!

So here's a really, really, technical solution.

For security reasons, Android will not let you look in /data/com.tinder. Inside /data/com.tinder/db/tinder.db is a copy of all of the messages you've sent and received in the app. So we need this file, but without a rooted phone, the only way to access this data is to access it through Tinder, which would require us to modify and recompile Tinder ;-). If you try to use a file manager to browse /data, nothing will show up.

At this point you can root your phone, which requires unlocking the bootloader, which has been claimed to void your warranty, and naturally, when you unlock the bootloader the phone is wiped for security reasons.

So rooting is really not an option for such a silly little thing. You might as well give up on this potential person, even if they are your soul mate? :-(

The workaround is to enable ADB USB debugging in Android, and take a backup using the adb tool on your computer, while it's connected to the handset. Do not set a password!

adb backup -f my_backup.ab -apk -shared -all

And confirm from the phone that you want to allow this backup.

At this point you'll have a huge file called my_backup.ab. You'll need to extract this using the Android Backup Extractor which will require Java7 to be installed. Then you can run:

java -jar abe.jar unpack my_backup.ab my_backup.tar

Which will create a standard .tar file called my_backup.tar.

We can then extract this using tar

tar -xf my_backup.tar

Then navigate to the folder that's created, apps/ then com.tinder/db

From here, open the database (a SQLite DB) using sqlite3 command:

sqlite3 tinder.db

Let's view some messages!

select * from main.messages LIMIT 10;

Anything look familiar here? It should!

Okay so this is all out of order. What we are looking for are the most recent conversations. The field we are interested in is called 'created', so let's order messages by that!

SELECT * from main.messages ORDER BY created ASC;

54ef7ac30147af1b7d000192|53ef05f9f6061a2f32055da4||2014-02-08T19:28:06.922Z||Lol I am, do you want to add me on Facebook? Suzy Queens|

The names and unique IDs have been changed to protect everyone involved. But hey! There's the message I've been looking for! A match made in heaven. The person will owe you a drink for all of the hard work you've done ;-)

So my advice would be, if you get a phone number or last name from someone you are interested in...take a screenshot right then and there...Tinder will hide the conversation if that person then leaves Tinder or unmatches you. Otherwise, use this method if you are nerdy, or just can't take a hint. ;-)