Media

Media files in Grindr are stored on cdns.grindr.com:443 hosted by Amazon CloudFront powered by AmazonS3. All CDN files are accessible without authorization but some are protected with signed URLs. No security headers or Authorization need to be present in a request to CDN.

Caching is supported via ETag header — MD5 hash of image file. Image files might have image/jpeg, image/png or image/webp type, based on original.

Media files are identified by either a 40-character (public files) or 64-character (signed files) hexadecimal string. Although not confirmed for all types of media, it appears to be SHA-1 hash for 40-character hash and SHA-256 hash for 64-character hash. Confirmed cases: Audio uses SHA-256 for its 64-character mediaHash.

CDN request headers

The official app sends Accept: image/webp,image/*;q=0.8 and the same User-Agent as the API, plus Accept-Encoding: gzip unless the request carries a Range. Same TLS and HTTP/2 fingerprint. No Authorization, no L-* headers, no cookies.

A signed URL keeps its path when it is signed again, so cache on the URL without its query. Chat image URLs repeat until they expire, album cover URLs are signed again in every response.

Album videos are played with android.media.MediaPlayer User-Agent:

Dalvik/<vmVersion> (Linux; U; Android <os>; <deviceModel> Build/<buildId>)

• vmVersion: ART version, 2.1.0 on every current release
• os, deviceModel: same values as the app User-Agent
• buildId: Build.ID of that exact OS build, e.g. UQ1A.240105.004 — device- and patch-specific, with no counterpart in any Grindr header

Example: Dalvik/2.1.0 (Linux; U; Android 14; Pixel 8 Build/UQ1A.240105.004)

Its first request carries no Range; seeking re-requests with an open-ended Range: bytes=<offset>-.

There are two types of files stored on CDN.

• Device keys
• Public CDN files
• Signed CDN files