How dating apps are researched

What the research is

Every app on this site is put through the same four steps before anything is published about it. Any page that says “our research” means exactly this list and nothing more.

1. Sign up as a new user. Most of these work in a browser as well as in an app, so the account is what matters rather than the download. Not with an account that has been sitting there for years. The first hour of an app is part of the product, and it is the part that most write-ups skip, because the person writing has been on the app since before the reader arrived.
2. Find out what is free, and where it stops. Some of these cost nothing for everything the reader actually needs, and others put a wall in front of the one thing the app is for. Either way it is the most useful single fact about a service, and the answer is different on every one. It is found by reaching the limit rather than by reading a complaint about it, and where there is no limit we say so.
3. Read the app’s own published help documentation. How an app describes its own matching, ranking, reporting tools and limits is worth reading even when it is vague, because the vagueness is usually deliberate and tells you something about the product.
4. Compare that against what users report publicly. Where the documentation and the public reports disagree, the page says so rather than picking whichever version is more flattering to the company.

What this site does not claim

There is no test result anywhere on this site, because no controlled test has been run. There is no match count, no reply rate, and no score measured on a test account. Describing a test that was never run would be a lie about method, and a lie about method makes every other sentence on the site worthless.

Nobody here claims to have used an app for a year, because nobody has. What the pages describe is the product as it presents itself to a new user, plus what its own documentation says, plus what the people using it report.

Why there are no prices and no member numbers

Both change constantly and neither can be kept accurate on a static page. A price written today is wrong within a year, and a wrong number on a page about money is worse than no number at all. The same is true of member counts, which are marketing figures that bear very little relation to how many people near you are actually opening the app.

So this site describes the structure of a paywall instead. Which action is free, which one sits behind the paid tier, and which one is the wall most people hit first. That description stays true for years, and it is the part that decides whether an app suits you.

The figures this site does quote

Published figures from government agencies are the one exception, because they are citable, they carry a date, and they can be checked by anyone. The fraud pages quote the FBI’s published romance scam figures and refer to the Federal Trade Commission’s losses by age band. Both are quoted as published, not rounded up and not embellished.

What no amount of research can tell you

Whether an app will work for you. The thing that decides it is how many people near you are actively using the app right now, and that is local, it changes month to month, and it is invisible from outside. A site that claims to know it for your town is guessing.

What the pages here can do is describe each app accurately enough that you can work out which one fits your situation, and say plainly when an app is not built for someone like you.

Corrections

Apps change their free tiers, their ranking and their interfaces constantly, so anything here can go stale. If something on this site is wrong, email support@midlifeinsider.com with the page and what is wrong with it. It gets fixed, and a correction that changes what the page says is noted on the page rather than quietly edited away.