New Dating App – AntiDate

The second new app of the evening is AntiDate.  Created by two successful female Cambridge grads, AntiDate has been praised for empowering single women, because of the asymmetrical experience it offers male and female users.  While women can see all men using the app, and even their location, should they wish, men can only see stats about the women nearby.  Only when a woman contacts a man, can he see her profile and contact her back.

However interestingly, rather than being designed as a outright feminist app, AntiDate was simply designed to tackle the many issues which co-founder Hatty Kingsley-Miller experienced when she, herself, was online dating.  In fact, the name comes as a direct affront to the standard online dating experience…

1) Hatty wanted to be able to control which men knew she was online dating.  She worked in a law firm, and didn’t necessarily want single colleagues to stumble across her online.

2) She constantly frustrated by going on dates with people who didn’t look at all like their profile photos.

3) Hatty also got fed up chatting to people for weeks, but it going nowhere.  And matching with people, but never hearing from them.

4) Finally Hatty, and her co-Founder Mo wanted to create an app for the ‘Uber Generation’.

As a result the app deals with all of these issues.

1) Female daters only show their profile to people they want to.  Which means if you spot someone on the app you know, he doesn’t need to know you’re using it.

2) The app requires users to take a time-stamped selfie on sign up, which means at least one photo on their profile will be recent.

3) Messages disappear after 24 hours, so you not only have to act quickly, but if things go wrong, you can’t spend your time wallowing and stewing over old messages.

4) The real time map allows you to see where all the single guys in London are!  (NB Men can turn off this function)

The app launched on Christmas Eve 2014, and membership has been growing steadily every since.  Despite the female-empowerment angle, more men joined than women in the first month, showing that men haven’t been put off, and the only complaints so far have come from men in areas where there are less female members, who haven’t had any messages yet! (Aw!!!)

I’ll be talking more about AntiDate, and the rise of female-empowerment apps, on my weekly blog for Time Out tomorrow.

Miss Twenty-Nine xxx