Tinder’s fake ‘height verification’ is now a real feature on another app

The April Fool’s joke from Tinder in 2019 is now a reality.

Seven years ago, Tinder joked that it was adding height verification to its app. Now, in 2026, the dating app Tenr has made that a reality.

“People care about length, and the app is not just BS-ing and giving information up front,” said Adam Moelis, founder of Tenr. (Moelis also founded the fintech company Yotta. In 2024, thousands of Yotta customers were locked out of their accounts and unable to access their money due to the failure of one of its banking partners. It appears that many customers are still locked out of their Yotta accounts as of this writing.)

What is Tenr?

Tenr is a matchmaking app that aims, as Moelis says, to cut the BS out of dating. The basic idea is that it doesn’t take a two or three hour date to know that you are interested in someone, but only ten minutes. Users sign up, answer questions about themselves and their preferences, and Tenr “aggregates information” to provide three to five matches per day. From there, you have a ten-minute date that the app calls “Tenr,” and each group decides to meet in person.

AI helps people with viewing, but it’s not Tenr’s main feature, Moelis said. “I don’t think AI is good at testing chemistry, and I think that’s probably the most important thing in dating. It’s like, do you guys have a power game? Do you have chemistry? And I think AI can’t do that yet. You still need to connect with the other person.” So, ten minute days.

How does the app verify height?

But back to the height. Moelis is right: Height matters to people. People have been complaining for years that women want to date tall guys. Women have used ChatGPT to catch men lying about it, and Tinder began testing a paid length option last year. (Tinder told Mashable there hasn’t been an update since then.) Hinge allows users to choose a height filter and there’s even a “deal breaker” option you can toggle if you’re not open to seeing any profiles that don’t match your preferences.

I personally believe that as a society we should stop staring at each other in dating, but the confusion continues. And now, the app goes into it and uses Apple’s Measure app to ensure accuracy. (iPhone 12 and up models use LiDAR scanners – Light Detection and Ranging – to produce accurate measurements.)

“We thought it would be kind of fun,” Moelis said. “No other dating app does that because it’s controversial, but we think it’s important to people.”

Here’s how height verification works on Tenr: Using the LiDAR scanner on the iPhone’s camera, a friend can hold the phone and point it at you. It’s pretty accurate — plus or minus an inch, Moelis says.

The feature has been live for the past few weeks, and is getting a fair amount of use. Moelis is actually surprised by the lack of negative reaction. More than 700 users have confirmed their height so far (and the app is close to 6,000 registrations as of May 2025).

Height validation, of course, is not an application-only feature. Moelis also talked about Wingman, where users can recruit friends to help them choose their photos and leave testimonials about them. But for those tired of men lying about a few inches on dating apps, this might be the only way to catch up — before meeting them IRL, that is.