Types (Niche)

By now, you’ve probably heard of Tinder even if you haven’t already tried it. The app has taken the dating world by storm, mostly because of its easy access through your phone, simple set-up, and the sheer number of people using it. Tinder makes it seem like dating options are endless.

But accessing Tinder through your phone and looking through each individual match takes way too much time, at least according to some daters. Botinder intends to resolve this problem by offering a desktop version of Tinder, where you can see several potential dates at once.

Developers are launching new unofficial Tinder apps and complementary extensions regularly, just to capture this fast-growing market and capitalize on it with the latest and greatest in dating technology, or at least establishing their own marketing spin. Botinder is an unofficial Google Chrome Extension that allows you to like and dislike Tinder users even faster than you can using the official app. And if there’s one thing Tinder users need, it’s speed. Swiping left and right through each individual candidate is way too time-consuming.

There is a strategy to Tinder which makes technology like Botinder appealing, at least for the guys. By saying “yes” to as many women as possible as quickly as possible, you greatly improve your chances of getting matched (or laid). For the women, it’s a bit different. They tend to be much more discerning, turning down potential matches a lot more often than accepting. With Botinder, they too can dislike matches more quickly, making the process more efficient for everyone.

According to website Business Insider, creating a desktop version of Tinder has been a popular request for a long time. Typically, users had been downloading an Android emulator to run a version of the app, but now this is a much easier way to run it on your laptop, for those who aren’t quite so tech-saavy.

Botinder sorts users by row, allowing you to organize your matches so you can compare or view photos several at a time. There is also a “Booster” function where you can choose “like automatically” and Botinder will start liking every Tinder user near you – multiple people a second – so you can’t really even see who you are liking. But that’s not really the point – it’s actually playing a numbers game with dating. It would take weeks of being a dedicated Tinder app user before you got the kind of instant matching success that is likely with Botinder.

The real question is: will Botinder improve the overall dating experience, or just add to the noise and confusion?

For more information on service this Chrome Extension works with you can read our Tinder page.

There’s no doubt about it, mobile dating is on the rise, and poised to take over the traditional online dating industry.

The figures are staggering: mobile dating apps were a billion-dollar industry in 2011, and by 2016, the market is poised to be worth 2.3 billion. This is a huge opportunity for some of the newer dating app developers, and also an opportunity for traditional online dating companies to improve their mobile platforms, as most have been doing the past couple of years.

While many app companies offer free downloads, they make money through advertising deals or through “freemium” services – that is, offering the basic service for free with added “extras” like more matches or instant communication features for a price.

According to an article in The Washington Post, a recent conference in June brought together people from the tech industry to try out different mobile dating apps for a couple of weeks, to see how they fared. The experiences varied for both men and women, with most agreeing that mobile dating offered a more casual dating experience. However, the more a dating app mimicked real life, the more successful the users’ experience with it.

Many daters find a level of comfort in apps that verify through Facebook or other means, for obvious reasons. With online dating, there is a safety factor to consider, especially for women, when you are meeting a complete stranger. There are also plenty of fake dating profiles with traditional sites and some apps, sometimes used to lure unsuspecting singles.

Most mobile apps however are tied to social media accounts like Facebook in order to verify that the dater is a real person. This adds a layer of security that allow users of an app like Hinge to meet someone they don’t know through friends.

Of course, meeting someone through friends is preferable in real life, so it makes sense that it is also preferable in a mobile dating app. Coffee Meets Bagel is an app that provides matches through your Facebook circles – that is, friends of friends - so you have to have a mutual friend in order to date. According to the company, the more mutual friends two singles have, the more likely they are to say yes to a date. In fact, if they have four mutual friends, they are 90% more likely to say yes.

This isn’t a coincidence. Since so many people are online dating, and dating with technology can feel intimidating to many, it makes the experience easier when you have friends in common.

Will newer dating apps come up with even more organic ways of meeting people? Since the mobile dating industry is only getting bigger, it seems the likely choice.

To find a list of popular services that you can use on your phone, please check out our Dating Apps category.

We live in a crazy world. And at the moment, nothing is greater proof of that and the fact that there is a Christian Mingle movie.

Yes, that Christian Mingle. The dating website that promises devout singles it will "find God's match for you." Someone in Hollywood apparently thought that sounded like a rip-roaring good time of a rom-com, and here we are, wondering what led us to this strange and confusing place.

Oh yeah, and did I mention that the lead role is played by Lacey Chabert, most notable for her turn as the ditzy Gretchen Wieners in Mean Girls? It just gets better and better.

Allegedly there is also a plot. It follows Chabert’s character, a 30-something marketing executive named Gwyneth Hayden, whose life is perfect except for one thing: it's missing a man. In a moment of desperation, she joins the Christian Mingle dating site in hopes of changing her fortunes – even though she is not a Christian. Here’s a synopsis of the rest of the film:

Tinder has become incredibly popular in the last couple of years, thanks to its game-like format of swiping left and right, and to its easy set-up. There’s no time-consuming process of writing a profile and anguishing over what to say in your messages. You cut to the chase: yes or no.

But now, people are looking for easier ways to date than even Tinder can provide. For those daters, there’s a new app for that called Tinderoid, short for Tinder on Steroids.

This app is mainly catering to the male Tinder users and online daters, especially ones who feel they aren’t getting enough matches. With online dating, guys send out mass emails when they aren't getting responses, hoping someone will email back. It increases the odds, at least. With Tinder, guys are adopting the strategy of saying “yes” to every match, and are just swiping right without even looking at photos. They figure if they swipe right to as many candidates as possible, their chances of getting dates (or getting laid) increases significantly.

But all that swiping right can apparently be tiring.

Tinderoid adds features to Tinder that its creators think are missing, one of them being the ability for a user to like everyone in their area. Tinderoid founder Mike (he provides no last name) tells website TechVibes that a user can like as many as 10,000 potential matches in a few seconds.

Then you can skip all that swiping and order a beer, waiting for matches to roll in.

This isn’t the only new feature Tinderoid added. The app also allows users to search for potential matches using keywords, and view multiple results at the same time. So instead of looking at people one by one, you can select a bunch at a time, and again – see who bites.

And while Tinder doesn’t have an iPad app, Tinderoid offers support for the tablet’s larger screen.

According to Mike, the app is currently available for iOS and has been downloaded over 100,000 times. It has over 5,000 five-star reviews on the iTunes store, I’m guessing from its male user base.

Will this be helpful to daters in the long run? Maybe for some guys, but not for most daters. Women tend to get overwhelmed by the sheer number of matches and messages they can get when they are online dating, get frustrated, and stop using the service, and it’s no different with Tinder. Women are still more likely to swipe left, mostly because of tactics like this, where guys tend to always say yes, even if they might not be all that attracted or interested in a particular woman. They are just seeing who they can get.

Tinderoid is only available on iTunes, but the company is working on an Android version. It is free to download, but if you want all ads removed it costs $2.99.

Ever wanted to be set up by a friend? Or have you been introduced to a potential date over Facebook by a mutual Facebook friend? If you prefer meeting dates through friends rather than strangers, you might be interested to know there’s now an app for making these types of introductions.

This idea isn’t a new one. Jess Meet Ken is an online dating service that allows you to set up your single guy friends by recommending them to your Facebook friends. Hinge and CoffeeMeetsBagel are both matchmaking apps that introduce you to potential dates via your circle of friends on Facebook. Even Tinder got into the matchmaking game over a year ago with its service Matchmaker, which allowed its users to introduce their Facebook friends to each other. Tinder has since phased out this feature.

But Mashr insists it is doing things a little differently and will be successful, because unlike Tinder, it is making matchmaking the core of its user experience.

Mashr is pretty straightforward. One user pairs two of her friends together, offering an explanation on why they should meet. If both of them agree, Mashr makes the connection, much like Tinder.

Although this can get embarrassing for the matchmaker. If one friend passes, the other friend knows it, and what if they happen to run into each other in real life, since they are in circles of mutual friends? It could get a little murky, as with any friendship-based set-ups.

It could be argued that this is a model that works in the real world in an organic way, so over an app, it just increases your chances to meet a good (and vetted) match. Mashr Co-Founder Brian Nichols told Tech Crunch in a recent interview, “I know Tinder is all the rage these days, but does it really make sense to meet with a complete stranger? Wouldn’t it make sense (and be safer) if you were connected by a friend to your future significant other?”

Nichols maintains that people are more likely to say “yes” to a date if their friends are recommending them, rather than easily rejecting a stranger after looking at a couple of pictures over Tinder.

“People are on Tinder for themselves, to play the game of Tinder,” Nichols tells Tech Crunch.

But Mashr is also making a bit of a game out of its app with MashPlay, which is a timed game where you try to match as many of your friends together as quickly as possible. MashFeed shows all the matches people are making, not just the ones that say “yes” to each other, which seems a little TMI for users.

Hinge, CoffeeMeetsBagel, and JessMeetKen are all matchmaking-based apps competing for the same users. We’ll see how Mashr stacks up.

A recent report of Tinder’s financial worth shows that its users aren’t going away anytime soon. The massively popular dating app is poised to increase its value and market share further over the next year. According to Market Watch, Tinder is growing at such a rate that Barclays predicts its valuation will reach $1.1 billion by the end of 2015, adding to IAC’s current $5.68 billion market cap. IAC owns many of the most popular dating sites, including Match.com.

What makes its value so high, considering the app is free for download? The answer is in the sheer number of users who download the app. As with most online dating sites, perception is key: the more users a site has, the more people will gravitate to it because they think their chances of getting a date, relationship or even hook-up increase.

Tinder’s popularity has taken off thanks to younger daters who embraced the mobile technology and liken Tinder to a game that is easy and fun to use. Plus, it has taken the stigma that is part of online dating away, because the app is mainly to support single people meeting each other casually as opposed to those looking to find serious relationships.

Tinder’s popularity is not just PR buzz. Its growth in the past year has been explosive, with 750 million swipes per day reported in February of 2014, up from 5 million in December of 2013. Today, it manages more than a billion swipes per day (resulting in 12 million matches each day). According to Market Watch, Barclays expects Tinder global daily active users to reach 20 million by April, or 40 million on a monthly active user basis. It also expects Tinder to generate as much as $180 million in revenue in 2015.

How Tinder will get this kind of revenue is unclear. Lately though, they have been floating a few ideas, including a “freemium” service where basic use of the app is still free but restrictions are in place that can be lifted for a fee - like the number of matches you get, or how many photos you see, or the ability to communicate. The founders don’t want to advertise on the app, but they are open to partnerships that would generate revenue from “real world behavior,” though they don’t define what that looks like. They are also focused on the age of Tinder users, and how they might evolve in their dating preferences as they get older. Right now, Tinder is mostly a product that young people use, especially teens and young twenty-somethings - those who might later graduate to a more serious pay service like Match.com.

Eyeballs are currency however, at least to investors, who see Tinder as a golden opportunity. For more on this dating app you can read our review of Tinder.