Coding has already started on a brand new dating app and I expect it will be ready for launch May / June 2016. It’s something new and very different to most of my sites. I’m not going to give away too much at this stage but here are some high level talking points.

Getting started

I have over a decade of experience in coding websites with tools such as PHP and MySQL and app development was totally new. I looked at Phone Gap, a technology that would allow a single development to be deployed on both iOS and Android. I also looked at native iOS development in Objective C and Swift. Phone Gap looked like an interesting technology but I felt it was a lot of loose parts held together with open source glue. I had concerns about speed, stability and security. That left coding a native iOS app with the choice of two languages. I opted for Swift which is the newest language provided by Apple. Objective C is well established and finding code examples online is very easy but the syntax had a lot of unnecessary complexities. Swift at the time of writing is on version 2.1.1 and very new, online code examples are less common and books are limited. However, Swift is a much cleaner language which swayed my decision. After a few weeks of watching Swift + Xcode tutorials on YouTube I had enough knowledge to start coding. No need for angel investors, funding rounds and £100,000+ development costs, which seems to be the normal way people launch a dating app.

Free and paid

My new dating app will not have adverts so it will therefore offer a free version and a paid version (which has more features). The free version will have enough functionally for you to find and date people.

More mainstream

The app will be focused more towards the mainstream dating market, rather than adult / casual niches.

Gamification

There is a real demand for dating that is not like traditional online dating. So the idea of searching and sending hundreds of messages will not feature within the app. There will be no need to enter long text descriptions, most of the functions are simply button presses. The app is all about speed. If you have 30 seconds of free time you can use this app.

Automation

Sign up to the app is ultra fast. The only keyboard entry in the sign up process is your email address and first name. Everything else is buttons and sliders. The app even uses face detection to automatically crop your profile picture. From starting at the home screen to having a completed user profile including matching preferences and profile picture can be done in less than 1 minute 20 seconds. This time also includes waiting for the confirmation email with your login password. The password system provides security with ease of use on a mobile keyboard, see this in action when the app is launched.

Swiping

Tinder created the swipe left, swipe right concept. This was a game changer in the industry and almost all new apps copy this idea. I will not be copying. I have something new to offer that is:

• Faster than swiping
• Will generate more matches

I would love to say more about this but I cannot share at the moment. I added more bullet points above a few times and then had to remove them!

Privacy

Identity protection is also vital in today’s world of cyber attacks. Any personal information that is not necessary will not be asked for. For example, the app will not ask for your date of birth. It simply asks for your age and then increase it by one every year. Sometimes your age will be out of date. If someone is 25 or 25.5 years old does it make a difference? I think not. Date of birth is something that banks ask for security validation so the app will not ask for it. Another mission is a member’s database that has no value to a cyber attacker. If I can pull this off will will share my own account details publicly.

Platforms

iOS will be first supported platform with Android to follow once I have a number of revisions of the iOS app complete. Efficiency is very important within my company and supporting two platforms at the very start of a new product slows down the process of arriving at the optimum version.

Marketing

Once the app is launched it will be promoted to my existing database of online daters, which is just over 1 million people. There will also be a dedicated web site to position the app.  I’m waiting for the new .app domain name extension before I settle on a domain and product name, I expect .app will be available early 2016.

Summary

I’m very excited about entering the app market after being in the web and mobile web arena until now. As the product gets closer to completion I will be sharing more information.