Features

Ask singles what they don’t like about dating apps and the grievances come pouring in. Profiles are too shallow. Pictures are heavily filtered or edited. Swiping to match is too superficial. Messages are cut and pasted. Conversations rarely lead to a date. Ghosting.

Garrett Fritz, an MIT aerospace engineer who began his career building helicopter simulators, aims to address these complaints with a new dating platform. Challengr requires users to create and respond to ‘Challenges’ within the app in order to match. A Challenge is a text-based question, dare, or thought that you think represents yourself or your ideal match. It could be as simple as “What was the last podcast you listened to?” or as intense as “Show me a video of you bench pressing your bodyweight.”

Image: Facebook

Facebook Dating made its much-anticipated debut in the US on September 5th, but concerns about its privacy issues have overshadowed the excitement in media coverage of the app.

Facebook was recently ordered by the Federal Trade Commission to pay about $5 billion in fines for privacy lapses, including its maligned partnership with Cambridge Analytica leading up to the 2016 elections. And most recently, the Attorneys General of eight different states have launched an anti-trust investigation of the company, specifically concerning the company’s privacy practices and purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram.

Still, Facebook Dating is betting on its wealth of personal user data as a competitive advantage for creating better matches to directly compete with apps like Tinder. (Match Group saw its shares fall 5 percent on the day Facebook Dating was launched, a sign of investor concerns about the new competition.)

Tinder has partnered with concert service Live Nation to offer its users discounted tickets to see their favorite artists - and encourage Tinder matches to go together.

The initiative is called “epic first dates” and provides $30 all-in concert tickets for shows like Meek Mill & Future, The Chainsmokers, Logic and A$AP Ferg, according to Billboard. Other concert tickets include Lukas Graham, The Head and The Heart, Young Thug and Machine Gun Kelly, among others. The promotion will run through the end of October.

If you want to try “epic first date,” you can simply swipe right on tour profile cards of bands you want to see when they appear in your feed. You can then follow the link to a dedicated landing page with tour and ticket information.

Match Group is serious about its expansion in the Asian market. It just announced the launch of its new app Pairs Engaged – a “marriage concierge” service to compete with the country’s popular arranged marriage industry.

Pairs Engaged is the opposite of the company’s star dating app Tinder. There’s no casual glancing through photos and swiping left and right. Instead, the customers Match Group is targeting are looking to get married within a year and are serious about the search process.

Image: Tinder

Tinder has announced a new safety feature for those in the LGBTQ community who are traveling abroad.

The new “Traveler Alert” feature allows users to hide their profiles on the app when they feel unsafe traveling in countries and regions that criminalize same-sex acts, according to website Lifehacker. International travelers are subject to the laws of other countries, so it puts LGBTQ folks especially at risk. There are currently 69 countries that persecute same-sex acts, and nine of these allow the death penalty to be imposed, including Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Tinder’s website stated: “It’s important to exercise extra caution if you choose to connect with new people in these countries - as some law enforcement have been known to use dating apps as tools for potential entrapment. Some countries have also recently introduced laws that criminalize communications between individuals on same-sex dating applications or websites and even aggravate penalties if that communication leads to sexual encounters.”

Image: The Meet Group

The Meet Group, the Pennsylvania-based parent to several dating and social networking apps, unveiled two new sets of features for its flagship dating and livestreaming platform, MeetMe.

The first updates focus on making MeetMe a safer, more welcoming and more inclusive space. The iOS and Android versions of the app now have a more prominent Report Abuse button - the largest, according to CEO Geoff Cook, seen in any major livestreaming app so far. When a user taps the button, a screengrab is automatically taken and sent to the company’s moderation team. The moderators can immediately review both the screengrab and the active livestream in order to take appropriate action.