Tinder Dating App Review: BBMLive’s Perspective

Tinder is the latest app that’s on everyone’s lips, which has been hailed the straight person’s Grindr. For those of you who are in the dark about what this is, you’ve either been living under a rock or just don’t have any gay friends. Essentially, it’s the frisky homosexual’s dream; an app with the ability to detect others who are within close proximity to you in order to arrange a meet up and see where things go.

Tinder uses similar technology to Grindr to detect those in the same vicinity as you and allows you to scroll through their select number of pictures, as well as informing you of any mutual friends or ‘interests’ on Facebook you might have with your potential match. We’re not sure this bodes well; we haven’t updated our interests on Facebook for quite some time, so we’re pretty sure all it consists of is The OC or whatever else we thought we were into when we naïvely embarked upon our Facebook journey six years ago. But it’s okay, we can update it to cool, sophisticated things like BBC Radio 2 if we decide to take this seriously.

Because we’re a curious bunch, we decided to test Tinder out for ourselves. On first impression, Tinder is quite callous. Maybe we’re just being sensitive, but the ease of the casual swipe to the left that initiates the arrival of a rather large red stamp glaring the word ‘NOPE’ seems a little harsh.

The selection of people on Tinder are a right old bunch, but then again, what did we expect. For example, meet Tim, 49 and 40 miles away. He looks friendly, but a 49 year old isn’t really what we’re looking for. NOPE. Does this app not have any sort of filter?

Will, 24. We’re encouraged by the little number one glaring at us in the bottom right-hand corner, which indicates we have a shared interest. Ah, it’s Marmite. We forgot we’d listed Marmite as an interest on Facebook. Fair enough, that still stands. And at least we both like it, because everyone knows how contentious the Marmite debate is, so we have one thing in common already. Will gets a swipe to the right and we’ll wait and see what happens.

Our initial run in with Tinder is ambiguous. It’s free, which is a bonus over internet dating and it’s certainly a speedy way to find someone you’re attracted to at a glance. But maybe that’s also what we don’t like about it. It’s based so much on the small amount of information you are given that goodness knows who you could end up on a date with or who you might mistakenly scroll past.

The verdict: Maybe we’ll just stick to going out and meeting people in real life.