this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2026
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I am currently developing one and what I can see is the following:
Those are pain points introduced by big corpos (e.g. Match.com) and the fact, that they have launched their apps before COVID.
I have addressed those pain points.
I worked customer service for match for almost a decade, so I can give you a few pointers.
People leave when they're the only ones in an area. So giving them something to do is important to retain people. The best idea I've ever saw was having a forum where people can discuss any topic. I think Match also tested public chatrooms and streams, but i didn't really dealt with those. You'll have to deal with forum drama and moderation, but some people will be very engaged.
Speaking of, moderation will take lots of time and effort. People sick. Make sure that moderation tools are as robust as the matching ones.
I think those are the general ones. Best of luck!
You've missed the big one. Those aren't people.
They are AI fronts for orgs of various size that will scam you for whatever opportunity they may discover.
You can't fix that. Try developing something that helps people instead of another platform to use them.
You want to help people meet? Open a bar.
Dating apps are scams. Either a scammer in Hyderabad is conning you or a scammer in a boardroom is selling your data and forcing invasive ads on you. Did you discover some other way of funding your project aside from the ads or making people pay for sex but pretending it’s classier when an app does it?
Good point. Men usually get contacted by a lot of “gold diggers” and content creators. Women often are targets from scammers or crypto bros.
Scammers can be avoided by using a mandated verification process. But here I don’t rely on a third party service, as privacy is a really important topic for me. I wouldn’t want users to be forced to upload sensitive data to Persona for example. This is why I have developed a small verification service, that applies some algorithms that have been working quite well according to the research papers. It will not be impossible to catch all scammers, but if 95% are cought, that’s already a big win. As for the other problem with people just trying to sell content, a working reporting system should help. The reporting systems of the current apps are majorly flawed, punishing legit people while protecting scammers. The reason is also gender based. The more women a dating app has, the more men are attracted, so women tend to get extra protection. That hurts the whole community.
As for the funding, this is such a difficult topic. The system costs money, so I need to get a bit of money back. I didn’t want any of the “pay to win” features. I also don’t want ads, not even sponsored content. As a video gamer, I tried then to figure out why free games such as Warframe or Path of Exile were earning so much money. It comes down to two things people are willing to pay for: Cosmetics and time-savers. So that’s what I now implemented. Decorate your profile with paid cosmetics. I don’t know how to implement the time-savers yet, so for now it is just cosmetics and an optional “buy me a beer” donation I offer.
It’s not just women being targeted. My roommate got conned for dick pics. He’s not very intelligent so he believed the scammer was going to send his nudes to friends and family. I had to explain to him it’s a scam and if he wants the guy to go away, take the power away. Let him send whatever he wants.
This situation isn’t uncommon. There are plenty of other people being conned on these things. It’s such a problem that most people who contact you on these apps are scammers so you are just wasting time feeding them. It’s more depressing than just staying single.
As long as the data is centralized it will be abusable too, especially in 2026. You could go decentralized to reduce costs and lighten the load, but that has its own risks for abuse and criminal activity.
The web is retracting.
Oh that scam happened to me personally, too. It is not just annoying, it is damaging people.
There is no option to go decentralized, as I have no incentive for others to spend computing power. Decentralized services are ideal for communication and I have also developed a fully peer-to-peer, end to end encrypted Discord alternative. I just didn’t want to release it yet, until someone verified the security layer. Other than that, I kinda need to have everything centralized to foster the community and to set the rules for that community.
As I am not investor backed and also don’t want to be, I focus on releasing in very specific locations at first to create revenue with small investments. It takes a bit longer, but the growth is more stable and more organic.
But decentralized is kinda perfect for this. Webtorrent is a standard now so you might not even need an app. Just have users seed the service. More users, better service, though webtorrenting the entire site would likely eat data so splitting the different where accounts sort of mesh messages within their area would make more sense than just tossing sniffies in webtorrent.