24 Scene 100,000 regular users, around 40% of them trans. Founder and CEO Kirill M, who developed the app in response to his trans woman friend’s lament that there were no appropriate dating apps in existence for the trans community, says: “We were worried users would be 90% cis men. Some trans people want to meet cis people but some want to avoid them.”
A H(app)y Ending?
The app also taps into the awareness that some people only want their profiles to be visible to users in specific age and/or gender groups, and they may not want to disclose certain information, such as their location. While such features are currently paid for, Kirill is working up to making them free in the future.
Between lockdowns and health fears, the pandemic has had a major impact on the habits of people using dating apps – and on the nature of the apps themselves. Jaq Bayles reports
“Squarely focusing on trans and non-binary users, the app has attracted some 100,000 regular users, around 40% of them trans”
) There’s an app for everything, and for some
Also, the app doesn’t have a swiping mechanism, instead working more like social media, with messaging at its heart.
things there are many apps: case in point – if a dating app was looking for a hook-up with attractive similar, shared interests, it wouldn’t have far to go.
video dates, with younger-generation users who have grown up under the influence of social media reportedly seeking fulfilling online experiences rather than only real-life meet-ups.
While you might be forgiven for thinking a global pandemic that confined much of the world’s population to their homes for months on end would put paid to prospects for a new swipe-right romance, lockdowns appear to have had led to a surge in dating app usage. A flurry of new apps coming at dating from a different angle have hit smartphones in recent months, while the stalwarts have – to embrace the word du jour when it comes to the pandemic approach – pivoted their approach to reflect the constraints of pandemic restrictions as well as the adjusted requirements of users. Some of the big names have logged a rise in
And updates to recently launched free apps are acting more along social media lines, including Fiorry, released under a year ago “to provide a safe space for a gender diverse community where people can find love and friendship”. Squarely focusing on trans and non-binary users, the app has attracted some
As part of its commitment to the trans community, the app’s creators have pledged that once it reaches “the milestone of 15,000 trans users who use the platform in a single day, we will sponsor five of them. Each sponsored user will then receive $5,000 from Fiorry, which they can spend at their convenience toward their personal transition goals”. The team is also “cracking down on harassing behaviour and filtering out fake profiles”, while security is an ongoing area of improvement. Security is also on the mind of serial app designer David Minns, whose self-confessed niche offerings include Dinky One (small penis dating), 20 (age gap dating) and Bald Dating (bald person dating) and he has now added So GAY!, “a serious dating site for gay, bisexual men and transgender folk”.
David says that “So GAY! has been named to turn a negative slur into a positive message” after he realised through a chat-based app he designed that the term was favoured as an insult by teenagers. “I thought it was something that could be embraced. I would hope it would filter through and start to undo some of [the insistence on using the term as an insult].” David believes: “Some of the existing gay apps have had awful privacy policies or are lacking security. For example, adding users’ private images into publicly accessible folders or storing GPS locations so accurately that you can reverse-engineer a user’s location. So GAY! has a strong focus on
