Chinese Dating App Lamour Takes off in India With Mixed Reviews

India has seen a surge of new online daters thanks to Chinese dating app Lamour, but many are not so happy with the service.

L’amour was the most downloaded dating app in India in 2019 according to Sensor Tower analytics firm, gathering 14 million users in the first six months. (By comparison, Tinder got 6.6 million downloads during this same time period.) Since the lockdowns, the app has been gaining steam.

India is still a growing market with huge potential when it comes to the dating app industry, and Match Group and Bumble have focused resources on expanding their user bases in the region the past few years. However, it’s been dating app L’amour that is garnering attention according to Quartz News, with ads that say “find a girlfriend in a week” to lure new (male) users. When they click on the ad and download the app, they are presented with photos of attractive potential matches and messages directed to them, asking “are you the one I’m looking for?” 

While it’s not unusual for a dating app to offer incentives like attractive profiles to get people to join, L’amour is a bit different because it pushes messages from potential matches immediately. When the user tries to respond, he is prompted to pay. As one user noted to Quartz, the messages slowed down noticeably as soon as he paid, replaced by offers for video calls, which again prompted requests for more money. Some daters felt pressured to purchase in order to interact with anyone over the app.

Most of the app’s users are men, and many have complained that they were lured in and disappointed when once they paid according to Quartz, because these messages and attractive candidates seemed to disappear.

Quartz said that L’amour hires “talent” via recruitment ads to create profiles and start reaching out to other users, most of them men, with cash incentives. The news service tried it themselves by joining as a woman and noticed that they were given a specific mandate to reach out to men when they join the patform. L’amour denies this practice.

According to website Worth however, L’amour is a success story. Its video-first approach (as opposed to swiping profiles) represents a more promising future in the Asian market than U.S.-based apps Bumble and Tinder. Livestream is very popular in Asian markets, and because L’amour offers video and audio chats as soon as you join, it’s been far more attractive to young dating app users.

In addition, the gamification of dating apps is important – and L’amour provides the ability to give virtual gifts and “culturally appropriate ways” to prompt users to better interact, according to Worth. When dating apps are message-based at first, like with Tinder, there can be problems with language and cultural barriers. L’amour also offers six languages - Mandarin, Cantonese, English, Japanese, Vietnamese and Arabic.

Andy Tian, CEO and cofounder of AIG, the holding company that operates Lamour, put it this way: “…you might have the case of two young Muslims—one in Qatar and the other in Indonesia—who are highly compatible except for language and distance. The Lamour platform can connect these two people in a culturally appropriate way that would never be possible with a Bumble or Tinder. It’s actually quite an amazing phenomenon to see such a different way to connect people, compared to what we are used to seeing on dating apps in the U.S. and Europe.”

Still, skepticism remains with users willing to share how unhappy they are with their experiences on the app. One user Goswami Ji said in a YouTube video about the app: “The moment you upgrade your package on the app, they all vanish. These are not real women. The people who run these apps are playing with your brain.”