India Market is a Tough Sell for Muzz Dating App

Muzz dating app, formerly MuzzMatch, has had a hard time growing an active userbase in India, despite the country having the third largest Muslim population in the world. Also, nearly 50% of India’s population is under 25 years, making the country the second-largest market for dating apps (after the United States).

Muzz is marketed as a matchmaking app rather than a dating app for Muslim singles, because as founder Shahzad Younas told Rest of World: ““We don’t date. We get people married.” The app however, is encountering safety problems concerning fake accounts and bots, a problem for all dating apps. But there are more issues to consider for a marriage-minded app in India, because dating app users have had their photos taken and used for other purposes.

One such high-profile incident happened in 2022, where a group worked to scrape photos of prominent Indian Muslim women and uploaded them to a dating app “listing them at ‘auction’ with an attempt to humiliate them,” according to Rest of World. This kind of behavior could become more common without specific protocols and safety measures in place.

Muzz does have selfie and ID verification features on its app, which helps to verify a user is who he says he is. But this doesn’t prevent scraping, according to Rest of World.

While Muzz does censor inappropriate language on its app, it doesn’t do complete message encryption. Younas argues that if it did, it would hinder the app’s monitors and moderators from being able to read and decipher conversations, and therefore prevent them from taking action. To date, he says, the app has blocked over 400,000 accounts. (Younas says that there are about 230,000 users in India, and the app has facilitated about 2,000 marriages.)

Privacy experts caution that moderators who have access to this kind of sensitive data might misuse it. In addition, people using the app might feel uncomfortable that someone is reading their messages.

There is a larger cultural dilemma for Muslim daters in India’s current political climate as well. There is a nationalist sentiment to favor Hindus, including a movement to change the country’s name to the Hindi word Bharat. Muslim women in Karnataka have been fighting to be able to wear hijab in educational institutions in the region, where they have been banned.

Muzz points out that the app is doing better in Pakistan, which is also more favorable to Muslims. Still, they see the Indian market as a growing market with huge revenue potential, thanks to its young population.

“We want to make sure we do things in India in a way that respects Indian Muslims, respects their Indianness and Muslimness, and we come there with the right message and at the right time,” Younas said to Rest of World.