Dating Apps
So I’ve delve a bit into dating apps and want to compare them on how they work and what I’ve noticed. This is from a perspective of a woman. I’ve been on these apps out of curiosity and have tried to match with people but nothing too serious. I also haven’t given any of these any money
Bumble So not only can you find a date on this app but they also have separate parts for those wanting to look for friends or career opportunities. You can’t have these active at the same time. What I mean by this is that you won’t get any new likes in your friends or career profile modes if you’re in the dating mode.
I like the prompts they have and other bio features. I feel I can really show who I am the best with Bumble. And each of these others can leave a comment on. If someone leaves a comment they will show up at the top of your Liked You page and it will ask you if you want to reveal their profile which is all free but I think there’s a daily limit. I feel this feature is a great way to stand out compared to the paid SuperLike for just being shown at the top and being able to reveal you with no extra cost.
As I swipe I noticed usually the first person shown is attractive as hell or someone who has Liked me. But if I keep swiping I no longer come across anymore people that have swiped me. The app doesn’t tell me if they like me until I swipe. If I swiped left it will notify me that I missed a match and I will have to pay to go back. When I get SuperLikes they don’t always come up asap. But once they do it will tell you they have SuperLikes you. But again you have to keep swiping until their profile comes up. Sometimes it can take a long time to even find another person that have liked you but this may be due to the allowed distance. My pool of Liked Me people just keeps increasing because none of these people are coming up as I swipe. I feel this might be a design choice to make you pay to show these people to you.
What is nice about Bumble is preventing the men from messaging you first. But if you’re not great at talking like I am it can be a challenge to figure what to say first.
What I find confusing about Bumble is how there’s a separate Bumble app for just finding friends. This seems separate from the BFF mode in the dating app as I had to do a new profile and none of my Liked Me is transferred ver.
I didn’t seem to come across scammers or bots on there as much as the other apps. Bumble does require your location and will publicly show the town you’re at in your profile. They do have a Travel mode which requires money if you wanted to change your location but it will make it big and obvious that you are using this mode which is is a nice way to flag people who aren’t there locally
Hinge This app I get the least amount of pool of people. I do not get as many likes on there. And the weird part is that the people I swiped left to can come back. So it seems your profile will get shown to people you swiped left to again. Even in a big city!
What I like about Hinge is that you can reveal the people who liked you. The newest one will always be the first one you can reveal and you can only reveal one at a time. They can also leave comments.
You can manually enter your location. I’m so if you wanted to see people from out of town or even in a different country you can! At no cost! I wish Hinge had more people as this is the least greedy app. Filling out your profile is nice too. I like that you can add a note under what relationship you’re looking for.
Badoo This app is interesting. It requires your location on the app but on PC you can manually add a location if you denied it access to your location.
What makes Badoo unique is having a separate page for people nearby. This page shows everyone without a blur which is great! You can tap on a face and it will bring up their bio. You can also send a message and start a chat right away without any swiping or matching. This can be annoying if end up getting spammed but so far I haven’t thankfully.
Another unique feature of Badoo is the notifications. It lets you know when someone just liked you or even looked at your profile from the nearby page.
Something wild about Badoo is that it auto gave me a free trial of their paid features. It didn’t notify me until over a day later that it gave me a free trial. None of the other apps have given a free trial. But now that I could see the list of people who liked me, it does help a lot but it does show the kind of people using it which aren’t my cup of tea.
Tinder Signing up was a pain. It’s takes awhile to get started and if you want to get verified this can also take a bit. I thought I was getting banned because nothing worked. I had to close and reopen the app several times to check if it’ll tell me if I was banned or not. I think this is due to that I did try to make an account before and it recognized me? I did look it up and it does seem like that if you got banned it’s possible to make a new account easily by using different photos and different phone number. There’s a ID verification too which I’m not sure what this really proves other than having your name and age the same.
What I notice right away is bots. Super attractive people with nothing in their bio. If you swipe on them they will match with you and it was easily to detect they’re a bot from just chatting with them.
This app is obviously the most known and there does seem like a huge pool of people and more attractive too. I do like that it does tell you if they liked you if their profile comes up. What is weird is that I have to do taps on the sides to pull up their bio instead of scrolling up and down which every other app does. It shows multiple colored icons on the bottom which aren’t explained. There’s a superLike which is the blue star and the purple lightning which is the boost which I’m not sure what it does. Tinder also has profiles that are not only empty but used photos that had no people in them. It will tell you if they’re nearby or active.
Writing your bio is a bit limiting not as many opportunities to really express yourself. I do like that it has an option to say that you’re looking for friends but this probably not a popular thing on Tinder. There is a neat Explore page where you can choose the kind of vibe you’re going for and show you people who they think falls under it. One is Gaming, another is Free Tonight, and quite a bit more! Not sure how they determine who falls into what since it’s not something you can choose to be in.
One of the benefits of Tinder is that since it’s well known there are extensions that can unblur photos. Sadly Tinder doesn’t let you scroll through the whole list so you can’t see everyone.