Mobile

Every new dating app on the market is trying to compete with Tinder’s soaring popularity. The only problem is, not many differentiate themselves enough to do it effectively. Most of the new apps have the same basic concept – swiping through photos of people nearby, seeing who you might want to message. Clover wants to do things a bit differently in the latest version of its dating app.

Clover launched back in April 2014 with little fanfare, but recently they have debuted a new feature to try and distinguish themselves from the Tinder-like apps. While many people enjoy “Tinder-ing, ” there is still a gap between what people expect from an online dating site or app and what they actually get – leading to much disappointment. Fortunately, this problem might persuade daters to try new apps – hoping to find the right formula for dating success.

Part of the problem Clover execs noticed with Tinder is that people weren’t actually meeting up in real life – they were just scrolling and messaging. So they decided to make Clover focused on getting to the actual date - but with simplicity and ease like Tinder, rather than complicated matching algorithms and a long communication process like traditional dating sites.

Instead of encouraging people to just scroll through photos, Clover’s newest version includes an “on-demand” feature that allows you to meet matches IRL (in real life) more quickly. It works like this: you pick a date and time in the calendar and where you want to meet (your favorite bar, restaurant, etc.), and the app suggests a potential prospect to join you. You then decide if you’d like to spend your time with him/her. If you do, the date is confirmed and all you have to do is show up on time.

“Our new on-demand service will find people that actually want to meet you and you’ll be able to find a date as easy as it is to order a pizza or a cab,” says Clover CEO Isaac Raichyk.

Raichyk argues that it is difficult to actually go on a date using other apps or even dating sites like OkCupid. Just because people are matched doesn’t mean that they will make the effort to meet. So why not do it more organically by confirming a date and time to see if there’s chemistry between you in person rather than waste more time texting back and forth for nothing.

While this sounds really good in theory, the app will have to prove itself in practice. The premium service is free for users to download and test for a week, but after that, it will cost you $9.99 per month - a hefty fee compared to most apps, but cheaper than online dating subscriptions and personal matchmakers. There are also certain pay-to-play features like a $.99 charge to change your name/ handle. The new on-demand feature however will be included in the free version.

Just how crazy are single consumers for Tinder? And how much will they be willing to pay for the service?

The company is betting that certain features will be very valuable to Tinder users who have been requesting them since the service launched. So valuable that the company will be beta testing different price points in the UK, Germany and Brazil, with prices ranging from $.99 US to $4.99 to as high as $20.00 US for the premium version of the app, Tinder Plus.

Tinder Plus will roll out in these three markets first to determine how to proceed in other markets.

JDate, a popular dating website for Jewish singles, has launched a new mobile app for its members.

In the past couple of years mobile apps have taken off among daters, especially with the popularity of free and easy-to-use dating apps like Tinder, so traditional dating sites have had to step up their mobile game. After all, most people have their phones with them at all times and are able to log in anytime, anywhere, as opposed to their desktops.

Desktop dating is almost a thing of the past. Since it’s much easier to access phone apps, mobile dating apps tend to be stickier for users – attracting people to check in when they are waiting in line or for a friend to meet them, or just bored. The more often people are logging in, the more attractive it is to other potential users, which is what online dating companies want.

Enter JDate’s new app, which they describe as “a robust, on-the-go experience.” The features however are pretty standard, compared to what is already available via mobile dating apps. The big difference is their loyal user base – singles looking for relationships with similarly religious people.

Some of the new features include a better snapshot of each potential match. For each profile, you can easily see information such as location, religious preference (orthodox, reform, etc.), how well matched you are (0-100%), and from the same screen, you can choose to look at profile details, chat, email, or flirt with your match.

Photo access has improved, too. From the app, you can scroll through hundreds of photos of your matches (a la Tinder), as well as upload your own either from your phone, Instagram or Facebook.

Subscribers have the ability to chat instantly with other members who are either currently browsing the app or on the site from a desktop, and can hold multiple chats at once. They also have the ability to see who has favorited them or viewed their profile, and to see who is nearby via the “Members of the Tribe” feature.

The app also includes JDate’s popular “Secret Admirer” game, where a member can anonymously show interest in another member.

Reviews on the iTunes store have been mixed. Many users are happy with the results compared to apps of other traditional dating sites like Match and eHarmony because of JDate's easy-to-navigate format, but they are frustrated by the search capabilities as well as how long it took the company to make a well-formatted app.

JDate currently has over 750,000 members worldwide. To find out more about this service you can read our JDate review.

Antidate may be the antidote to disappointing mobile dating. At least, that's what they hope to be.

The dating app space is obviously exploding (thanks primarily to Tinder, but also apps like Happn and Hinge). The latest contender to enter the ring is Antidate, which hopes to knockout the competition with its asymmetric, gender-skewed approach to the dating app experience.

Here's the twist: male users are visible to women within the app (and their location is plotted on a map), but women aren't visible until they indicate interest in someone (by initiating a conversation, for example, or clicking a guy's profile). This strategy allows women to filter out unwanted advances while men get to sit back, relax, and let the ladies take the lead.

"When we first talked about a dating app, Tinder hadn’t launched and the only mobile dating apps we knew about were the gay ones like Grindr. We knew girls wouldn’t want to be viewable on a map so came up with the idea of an asymmetric experience for guys and girls,” co-founder Mo Saha told TechCrunch.

Saha saw benefits for both sides in Antidate's concept. Women could feel safer, knowing that their location information would never be revealed, and could avoid receiving messages from men they weren't interested in. Men who were tired of always making the first move could use the app to reverse the typical dating dynamic. “We also knew that online dating conversations are five times more likely to continue if started by a girl,” Saha noted. Win-win-win.

Antidate is still in the early stages, but it has a few other interesting tricks up its sleeve that might help it get noticed, such as:

• A real-time selfie requirement that time stamps photos, to eliminate the problem of people posting out-of-date photos to their profiles
• A rating feature, so users can indicate how much someone they met in real life looks like their photos
• Ephemeral messaging, so communications between potential dates disappear after 24 hours
• An Instagram usage requirement, which filters (no pun intended) the pool of prospective users and targets a younger, more social crowd

Although it's been in development for around 2 years, Antidate has only been out in beta on iOS for a few months. A full version launched recently and a marketing push is planned for the December holidays. Keep an eye out for what could be your new favorite dating app in 2015.

Just as Tinder’s founder Sean Rad was at the top of his game, enjoying the enormous success of his dating app Tinder after two short years on the market - and about to announce the new features offered in the latest version of the app - the board has decided to take away his CEO title.

As reported originally in a cover story for Forbes Magazine, Rad has been demoted to President, his management power greatly reduced for a yet-to-be-determined CEO who will take the reins of Tinder from him. According to Forbes, IAC decided that the company needed a more seasoned CEO (“an Eric Schmidt-like person”) leading it and taking it to the next level of a viable, revenue-generating business, as opposed to the young and green entrepreneur who brought Tinder to its current success. And also, preferably not a CEO tainted with scandal.

When Rad first launched Tinder, he did so with a lot of help from his friend and social trendsetter Justin Mateen. By approaching social influencers at universities (such as fraternity leaders), Mateen managed to get a lot of people using the app quickly, so the user base only grew stronger with time and more than a little PR.

Mateen and Rad built up the company together, but the scandal started when Mateen started dating one of their employees. When that relationship went south, the employee decided to pursue a sexual harassment lawsuit based on angry and inappropriate texts she had received from Mateen, and sued the company. She reportedly walked away with a little over a million dollars, but Mateen and Rad seem to be paying a higher price. Rad was implicated because he was the one who stripped her of her VP title and later “wrongfully terminated” her, according to the lawsuit.

But will all this drama derail Tinder itself? Not likely. The company continues to grow, and the revenue plan for its new premium service – Tinder Plus – rolls out this month with two new features for paying customers. The basic Tinder app will remain free.

The new version includes a travel feature called Passport, which lets users journey around the globe, swiping through matches in various cities instead of having to choose one based on their GPS location. The second feature is something users have been requesting from the beginning – an “undo” button that lets them revisit profiles they’d already rejected. Everyone deserves a second chance, right?

The company plans to launch another feature in the near future called “Places,” which will allow users who frequent the same places to meet over the app.

Will Tinder maintain the enthusiasm of its investors and the public at large after Rad steps down? Will customers be willing to pay for the benefits of Tinder Plus? We’ll have to wait and see.

Let’s face it, we human beings are visual creatures. When you meet someone new in person, what’s the first thing you do? Most likely, you look at him and decide on how attractive he is. Would you pursue him if you had an opportunity?

This type of superficial behavior is pretty standard. Most of us assess and judge others according to their appearance. The soaring popularity of apps like Tinder give us evidence that even in the digital age when we can get more information on almost anybody we meet if we just took the time to Google them – we prefer to say yes or no based on their looks.

Case in point: in the two years Tinder has been on the market, smartphone sales have gone up dramatically, which means more people have access to the app. The statistics speak for themselves. Tinder processes more than a billion swipes daily, matches more than 12 million people in the same amount of time (only a fraction of the overall swipes are mutual however), and though the company won’t release information on the number of users, sources say it could be as large as 50 million active users.

More important than people signing up for Tinder is the fact that they use it – as regularly (if not more often) as other popular social media like Facebook or Pinterest. According to a recent article in The New York Times, on average, people log in to the app 11 times a day. Women spend as much as 8 and a half minutes on it, while men spend 7.2 minutes (sorry guys). If you add it up, that’s almost 90 minutes per day.

But is the phenomenon of Tinder purely based on our basic animal instincts? Are we really only looking for someone who is physically attractive, or who embodies a physical ideal of some sort?

Maybe not. Many of Tinder’s users (mostly men) are looking to rogue apps like Tinderoid that manipulate Tinder’s database so they can “swipe right” to multiple profiles at once without even looking at a single photo. They are looking to increase their odds of matching with a woman, rather than looking for someone they find physically appealing. But what is the goal - is it just to hook up with more women? Maybe, but that’s another matter.

Tinder is a vehicle for meeting more people, and works a lot faster than your traditional online dating process. Maybe it’s appeal is not just about the photos, but instead due to the vast quantity of people you can “pick and choose” anytime, anywhere - and how quickly you can match and meet up.

The real question is: does it improve the overall dating experience? The jury is still out on that one.