Types (Niche)

BLK Profile Badges

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BLK, a dating app for black singles, is rolling out an array of new profile stickers for users to highlight who they are and spark conversations with potential matches.

The company is offering a range of badges to help users identify themselves through more than just pictures, a feature many dating apps offer, but this one particularly unique to the black experience. BLK also wanted to add to the community building on its platform, which took off along with the racial justice movement in 2020 when users were sharing resources with each other over the app and engaging in conversations about their experiences.

The new badges are artistic and whimsical and include choices such as “Black biz owner” and “Community activist” to describe work, as well as “Caribbean Descent” and “Afro Latino” to identify cultural roots, and “Naturally Dope” to highlight allegiance to the natural hair movement. Other identifiers like “Poly” and “Transgender” are available to choose from too, according to Business Insider, for a total of 30 badges. The stickers were designed by Colombian-born and now New York-based artist Leonel Gonzalez.

Match Group has sued Alphabet Inc.’s Google to avoid being kicked out of its Play Store. The dating app conglomerate has refused to pay the required 30 percent commission of its in-app sales to the tech giant. Match joined with other companies like Epic Games in fighting Google, citing its hold on app developers to prevent them from using third party payment systems.

Google said they will block downloads of Match’s dating apps starting June 1st if they don’t comply with Google’s contract and payment system and share the revenue from in-app sales, according to Reuters. Apple is fighting similar issues with Match Group in The Netherlands, where Dutch regulators have required Apple to allow third party payment platforms for dating apps. Apple has allowed third party providers but so far has not compromised on their commission, charging app developers 27 percent even if they use a third-party payment platform and not Apple’s. 

"These exorbitant 'fees' force developers to charge users more for their services and utilize resources they would otherwise invest in our employees, technologies, and user-requested features," Match Group said when it announced its lawsuit. "In addition, monopolizing the market for in-app payments will further cement Google's near-total control of the Android ecosystem."

Dating app Grindr announced it will become a public company through a merger with Tiga Acquisition, and that the combined companies have been valued at $2.1 billion.

According to Bloomberg News, Tiga is a special acquisition company and isn’t offering any private investment in public equity (PIPE) deals but will provide Grindr with an estimated $384 million in cash proceeds, which includes $284 million of Tiga’s cash in trust plus up to $100 million in a forward purchase agreement. The company will use the funds to pay down debt and invest in future growth.

Grindr had several offers from other SPACs before merging with Tiga.

Match Group has won the lawsuit it brought against dating app Muzmatch for trademark infringement violation.

According to The Guardian, the UK intellectual property and enterprise court ruled in favor of Match, which owns popular apps like Tinder and Hinge. Muzmatch, a niche dating app for Muslim singles, could now be forced to change its name or pay damages, according to The New York Times.

Match Group claimed in the lawsuit that consumers might think Muzmatch was a “sub-brand” of theirs targeting Muslim daters because of its name. Deputy high court judge Nicholas Caddick QC agreed, stating that using “match” in its name “would have led some consumers to assume that the goods and services offered by Muzmatch were somehow connected with or derived from Match,” according to The Guardian.

Dating app Romeo started a new forum for its users to be able to offer support to Ukrainian refugees, and thousands of members were quick to respond.

The gay dating app is based in Germany and has been popular for years, mainly in Eastern Europe. One of its high-profile features is “groups” or chat forums where users can congregate and discuss topics of interest. This past week, when Russia invaded Ukraine, the app decided to harness the traffic in these forums to call on users for help. Developers launched a group called “Shelter for Ukraine” so that users could offer assistance those fleeing the war.

The app was quickly overwhelmed with users wanting to help, with 8,000 members joining the chat after being active for only four days.

Dating app Tinder said that it would be ending the controversial aged-based pricing structure for its premium service Tinder Plus by the end of the second quarter.

The news follows a recent UK study that found users were paying wildly different prices to access Tinder’s premium service, typically based on age, which raised questions about discriminatory pricing.

According to Buzzfeed, the Mozilla Foundation and Consumers International took up where the UK consumer watchdog Which? and Australian consumer advocacy organization Choice left off when they first pointed out the issue of price discrepancies on the app. The researchers at Mozilla and CI didn’t find statistically different prices based on race, gender or sexual orientation, but did find it among different age groups.