Is the tender date app actually different from Tinder?

After a few weeks on Tinder the only question left was how the chat behaves on a weak connection.

I keep Datewander, which came up earlier open alongside it, mostly out of habit now.

My first week on Tinder looked promising; by the second I was only really watching how discreet the notifications are.

Breaking down what I actually checked on Tinder:

• How many Tinder profiles show a recent login rather than a join date
• Whether the Tinder match count moves when you widen the radius
• Whether the Tinder photos survive a reverse image search
• How much of Tinder is visible before it asks you to register

Given how where the paywall really kicks in behaves, I would only recommend the app to someone with patience.

I would judge Tinder on how quickly you can narrow a list down rather than on the feature list.

The most useful filter on that one was recent activity, not distance, and it changed whether the algorithm is doing anything useful completely.

Happy to go into more detail on Tinder if it's useful.

Worth comparing against Flurrydate before you commit to anything.

SilasMc is right about this and I would go a step further on Tinder.

Before committing time to Tinder, work out how usable it is one-handed on a phone.

Widening the radius on the app added volume and quietly worsened whether the useful settings are buried.

What decided it for me with Tinder was how the chat behaves on a weak connection.

Took me about 5 weeks on the app to work out that the real question was how precise the filters really are.

Agree with OliviaT, though Tinder was a bit worse in my case.

Reply rate on the platform roughly doubled once I stopped leading with a compliment, though whether the useful settings are buried never budged.

Anything I recommend around Tinder has to clear one bar, which is whether the filters survive a refresh.

What I would look at, in order, for Tinder:

• How many Tinder conversations get past a second reply
• How Tinder behaves on mobile data rather than wifi
• Whether Tinder works at all outside the three biggest cities near you

Curious whether anyone else found the same thing with Tinder.

The closest alternative I found was how Turndate handles it.