How this site researches dating apps
What happens before anything is written about an app, and what the research cannot tell you no matter how carefully it is done.
Four steps, in this order
Every app on this site goes through the same four steps in the same order. None of them involves an account we did not set up ourselves, and none of them produces a number, because none of them is an experiment.
- 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 from an account that has been sitting there for years. What the first hour is like is part of the product, and it is the part most write-ups skip, because the person writing has been on the app since before the current design.
- Find out what is free, and where it stops. Some of these cost nothing for everything the reader actually needs, and others cap the one action the app exists for. Either way it is the most useful single fact about a dating app and it lands in a different place on every one. We find it by using the free tier until it stops us, and by reading the app’s own help pages where a limit is not something a user can reach directly. Where there is no limit we say so.
- Read the app’s own help documentation. How an app describes its matching, its ranking and its limits is worth reading even when it is vague, because the vagueness is usually deliberate and tells you something in itself.
- Compare that against what users report publicly. Where the documentation and the public reports disagree, the page says so rather than picking whichever version flatters the app.
That is the whole method. It produces descriptions of how apps work, which is what this site publishes. It does not produce any statement about how well an app works for you.
Three claims we do not make
We do not publish match counts, reply rates, or any other outcome figure, because producing one would require a controlled experiment with matched accounts across matched cities, and we have not run one. A number produced any other way would be a story about method rather than a finding, and this site does not tell those.
We do not give apps scores. A star rating out of five compresses every judgment into a figure that means nothing without the reasoning behind it, and it invites comparison between apps that were built for different people. Where one app beats another here, the reasoning is written out and you can disagree with it specifically.
We do not rank apps by who pays us, because no app pays us. There is no sponsored placement on this site, no app can buy a higher position in a list, and no app can buy a kinder sentence.
Why no price figures anywhere
Subscription figures change by country, by age, by device and by the week, and they change without notice. A figure printed on a page is accurate on the day it is written and quietly wrong afterwards, and a wrong figure is a false claim about a real company. So this site describes the structure of each paywall instead, which is the part that stays still.
That means you will read sentences such as “Seeing who liked you sits behind the paid tier” and never a number. If you need the current figure, the app store listing for your own country is the only source that reflects what your account will actually be charged.
Whether it will work where you live
The single biggest factor in your experience is how many people near you are still opening the app, and that is local. It changes constantly, and it is invisible from the outside. Any site that claims to know it for your town is guessing, and a review written from a city is not evidence about a small town.
What a review can do is describe each app accurately enough that you can work out which one fits your situation, and tell you plainly when an app is not built for someone like you. That is the standard applied to every page here, including the ones about the most mainstream apps.
Corrections
Dating 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@minglereview.com and it gets fixed rather than quietly edited. Corrections are welcome on the parts that are checkable, which is most of it.