Today Internet is at the center of our social lives where we go shopping, catch up with friends, and even find romantic partners. Like eCommerce and social media, online dating too has emerged as a major industry in recent times and numerous surveys including one from Pew indicate that people using these services more than ever.
Now when we talk about dating applications, two names immediately capture our attention- Tinder, and OkCupid. In fact, Tinder is the application that essentially created the concept of swiping left or right to get a romantic partner- an interface later adopted by almost all such applications.
If you too want to get a piece of this booming market, you first need to understand what’s wrong with these popular applications- mistakes you must avoid:
Starting with Tinder, the overly simplistic user interface of swapping left or right has become a passive activity for users rather than an active work of looking for partners. Users generally make their swipes in spare time, like a game, and then maybe days later come back to catch up with their matches, when they actually wish to go on a date. This, in a sense, beats the core purpose of the application.
Along with that, one common problem that both of these applications have is that both of them are gender neutral- which seems like a good approach on the surface but if you dig deeper, you will see the underlying flaws. In both these applications, once a match is made, both men and women can initiate the conversation, which considered that men are generally horny and stupid, is a very bad idea. Ask any female user of these applications and they would tell you the vulgar and abusive language is common in their inbox. So the fact of the matter is, if half of your users feel threatened on the platform, there is no way it can grow beyond a place to hookup.
So if you wish to build a mobile app for dating and grow a sustainable business upon it, you must be willing to go beyond the obviousness of both these applications and deliver a fresh experience to your users; Or at least an experience that filters the best of both these applications withoutlosing out on any features. Here are two applications you can learn a lot from:
League
League is an invite-only application that only accepts ambitious and achieving individuals- which is just another way of saying people with ‘ivy league’ education and executive-grade jobs.
Bumble
It is naive to assume that people with good education and jobs aren’t abusive. So Bumble changes the rules of the game instead of trying to filter the audience. Founded by one of the Tinder co-founders, it has gained massive popularity in recent years owing to its unique approach to dating that solves all the three problems mentioned below:
Women-centric
Bumble is a women-first platform where if a match is made, only women can initiate the conversation. This has two immediate benefits- 1. It drastically reduces the unwanted attention and abuse that women face on these platforms; 2. It passes the initial burden of starting the conversation to women- who are generally more skilled for the occasion than men.
Urgency
For every match, women have only 24 hours to initiate the conversation, bringing an urgency and seriousness to dating experience instead of a casual, fun process.
More than a romantic relationship
As mentioned earlier, most of the people use dating applications for hookups- which isn’t bad but does not exploit the full potential of the application. Bumble goes a step further to let women of similar taste create a community and thus expand its use-case from a mere dating app to a sort of social media app.
Closing remarks
Despite a number of established dating applications, there is still a lot of uncharted territory in the domain full of potential opportunities. But before you hire app developers to build a clone of any such application; you need to first take a hard look at your core strategy that would ultimately decide the long-term viability
