Mobile

Actor Rebel Wilson has announced the launch of her new dating app Fluid, designed to help daters find relationships that are about “love with no labels.”

The dating app allows users to set up their profiles without having to identify the gender or sexual preference of their potential partners, or to define themselves by a limited number of categories. According to Wilson, the app’s algorithm factors in the profiles you are spending more time on and serves up other profiles based on those, rather than filtering out potential matches according to sexual and gender preferences, allowing singles more opportunities to explore different types of relationships.

“This is the first dating app where you don’t have to actually define yourself or tick a box to say ‘I’m straight, I’m gay, I’m bisexual,’ and you don’t have to describe what you are looking for,” the Pitch Perfect star told People Magazine.

Dating app Hinge has introduced a $60 per month subscription plan for “highly motivated daters,” offering the app’s most premium service for a hefty price tag.

The new plan will offer subscribers more exposure and better recommendations for potential matches, according to Bloomberg who broke the story. For example, top-tier subscriber “likes” will be seen before others’ likes, giving them quicker access to people who interest them.

The new tier pricing almost doubles the cost of the existing premium service of $35 per month, but is still well below matchmaking rates, which run thousands of dollars per month. The new plan was mentioned in an earnings call in November, and while the company confirms it will be launching, it has not been officially announced.

Major Australian news outlet ABC is providing tips for dating app users to prevent scammers from obtaining their personal information.

A report from the Australian Competition Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) Scamwatch came out that dating app users lost $38 million to romance scammers on dating apps across the country in 2022 alone, alerting officials to a growing problem. Many dating app users have no idea how easy it is to gather information about a person from what they post in their profiles, so ABC obtained tips from security experts to help raise awareness. 

According to associate professor at Central Queensland University’s College of Information and Communication Technology Ritesh Chugh, scammers don’t need access to a lot of information. If they have a couple of pieces, such as your full name or birthdate, that could be enough for them to do some damage. And even if you aren’t posting this information to your profile, there are ways they can obtain it.

OkCupid recently surveyed its users regarding their attitudes about dating going into 2023, finding that singles are more interested in open relationships and discussions about sex.

OkCupid had nearly 10 billion responses to matching questions in 2022 which revealed what singles will be looking for in 2023.

In addition to the pandemic’s impact on dating habits in general, younger daters are driving conversation around mental health, sober dating, and attitudes towards relationships and sex, according to OkCupid’s blog. Open relationships have been around for a while, but now young daters are challenging the stigma that has always been attached to them. Over the summer, OkCupid found that there was a 26 percent increase in mentions of “ENM” or “ethical non-monogamy” compared to the beginning of 2022, and a 42 percent increase compared to last summer.

Attitudes towards open relationships have shifted globally – with 30 percent of OkCupid users saying they would be interested in an open relationship (about 8.5 million singles), with Gen Z and Millennial daters being the most interested in ENM. The numbers are highest among European daters, with 49 percent of singles in Spain saying they would consider an open relationship, 46 percent in Switzerland, 40 percent in the Netherlands, 39 percent in Germany, and 37 percent in Italy. Brazil, Australia, and Canada had 35 percent, 34 percent and 31 percent of users interested in open relationships, respectively.

In response to increasing scrutiny of its Play Store practices, Google has announced it is opening up its platform to third party payment systems in 35 additional countries.

Currently, Google is the only option for an in-app payment provider on its platform in most countries aside from South Korea, which means it can charge commission (as high as 30 percent) to app developers for every single in-app purchase made by their users. Developers began to fight back, and along with help from European regulators who began to crack down on Apple and Google for their App Store and Play Store practices, they are finding success.

This new initiative has opened up platforms in the US, Brazil and South Africa, in addition to those markets which had already required third party payment system options to be available for developers, such as the EU, Japan, Australia and India.

Image: Bumble

Bumble has open sourced the AI it uses to detect nude photos, giving developers the technology to help combat the sending of unsolicited images over their platforms.

Bumble’s photo blocking feature called Private Detective aims to curb so-called “cyber flashing” that users have long complained about on dating apps, giving the user the option to delete and report the sender without having to view it. The refined version of the same AI is now available on GitHub for commercial use, distribution, and modification, according to Tech Crunch. The idea is to provide the technology to smaller companies who don’t have the time or resources to develop themselves.

In theory, as Tech Crunch points out, this AI could go beyond dating apps to be incorporated into any app or social platform to help shield users from unwanted content and cut down on lewd photos sent over many types of apps.