Finding that special someone can be hard. Harder? Finding the perfect dating app to meet said person. That’s where I come in. Consider me one of the wise characters from a beloved movie about to offer you advice as you venture on your dating app journey. I downloaded three of the more well-known dating apps and gave a layout rating and an overall rating.

Graphic by Rebecca Hooper

Bumble

Pros? Girls have to message first. Cons? Girls have to message first.

Also, if you match with someone, you only have 24 hours right when you match to message/reply or they disappear forever. This dramatically decreases the likelihood of actually matching with someone long enough to have a conversation.

However, I do feel as if people who are more serious about their relationship status use this app, versus Tinder which seems to be used a lot more by people looking for hookups. An added Bumble bonus is the option to see unread messages, recent messages, and people you have messaged that are nearby.

Graphic by Rebecca Hooper

Tinder

Tinder is probably the first thing that comes to your mind when you think of dating apps. You can adjust your age range and the distance you want the app to reach out to. This makes your preferences easy to attend to. However, I personally find the app’s feed feature annoying. One big con about Tinder is that you can run out of swipes and have to wait 12 hours to be able to get back on the swiping track.

Graphic by Rebecca Hooper

Badoo

Badoo is a complicated app from the start. Sure, the act of ‘swiping’ is generally the same as the others, but, overall, the app is a hot mess. There is an actual place in the app where it brings up people in the same area as you, but another place on that shows who is nearby (which is pretty much the same thing?).

There is a feature that shows if you ‘bump’ into someone else who has the app. Creepy. Also, you get a notification whenever anyone looks at your profile, likes you, or messages you regardless of whether you have ‘matched’ with them or not. Due to this, your notifications for the app are endless.

The app also gives you a popularity rating (which is so high school) based on activity. A plus, however, is that you can ‘favorite’ some people you match with to find them easily. The biographies also give you the opportunity to add specific information about yourself, such as details about your appearance, relationship status, how you feel about having kids and more. The con to this is that you can’t see all this information on someone else’s profile unless you fill yours out at least 60%.

Also the app has read receipts so anyone can tell if you have read their messages or not. And, hiding behind a screen, they won’t hesitate to call you out on it.

Overall, I would say that Tinder was the best because there are a lot of people on it, the layout is easy to understand and adjusting your settings is simple. Bumble follows behind as a close second. Best of luck swiping!

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