INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Dating app Happn, whose &missed connections& type of dating experience connects people who have crossed paths in real life, is fighting back
Seemingly inspired by Happn location-based features, Tinder recently began piloting something called Tinder Places & a feature that tracks
your location to match you with those people who visit your same haunts & like a favorite bar, bookshop, gym, restaurant, and more.
Of
course Tinder move into location-based dating should worry Happn, which had built its entire dating app around the idea of matching up
people who could have met in real life, but just missed doing so.
Now, Happn is challenging Tinder Places with a new feature of its own
It debuting an interactive map where users can discover those people they&ve crossed paths with over the past seven days.
Happn founder,
French entrepreneur Didier Rappaport, dismisses the Tinder threat.
&We don&t see it as a threat at all but as a good thing,& he tells
&Find the people you&ve crossed paths with has always been in Happn DNA since the beginning….We are very flattered that Tinder wants to
include the same feature in its product
However, we will never use the swipe in our product,& he says.
Rappaport believes swiping is wrong because it makes you think of the other
person as a product, and that not Happn philosophy.
&We want to [give our users a chance] to interact or not with a person, to take their
time to decide, to be able to move back in their timeline if suddenly they change their mind and want to have a second chance,& he
notes.
To use Happn map, you&ll tap on a specific location you&ve visited, and are then presented with potential matches who have been
there too, or within 250 meters of that spot
The map will use the same geolocation data that Happn already uses to create its timeline, but just displays it in another form.
For those
who aren&t comfortable sharing their location all the time with a dating app (um, everyone), Happn also offers an &invisibility& mode that
lets people hide their location during particular parts of the day & for example, while they&re at work.
While Happn new feature is a nice
upgrade for regular users, Tinder location-based features & we&re sorry to report & are more elegantly designed.
Today, Happn invisibility
mode has to be turned on when you want to use it, or you have to pay for a subscription to schedule to come on automatically at certain
That means it requires far more effort to use on a day-to-day basis.
Meanwhile, Tinder Places lets you block a regular place you visit &
like, say, the gym & from ever being recorded as a place you want to show up for matches
It also automatically removes places that would be inappropriate, including your home and work addresses, and alerts you when it adding a
new one & so you can quickly take action to remove it, if you choose
Tinder Places is also free
(It just not rolled out worldwide at this time).
Happn, however, does offer a way to hide your profile information and other details from
select users, and never shows your current location in real time, also like Tinder.
Happn, which launched back in 2014, now claims nearly 50
million users worldwide, across 50 major cities and 40 countries
It claims to have 6.5 million monthly users & but that much smaller, compared with Tinder estimated 50 million actives.
And with Tinder
parent Match Group snatching up Hinge, suing Bumble, and effectively copying the idea of using &missed connections,& one has to wonder how
much life rival dating apps, especially those of Happn size, have left.
The app is a free download on the App Store, Play Store and Windows
