Used phone apps for about six weeks, which is long enough to have an opinion.
What decides phone apps for most people is the day of the week you actually use it, not the app itself.
Worth doing early on phone apps: finish the profile completely before you browse anything.
With phone apps the thing that decided it for me was whether the match volume held up past the first week.
What I wish someone had told me about phone apps: keep the first message to two lines with a question in it.
What mattered most with phone apps in the end was whether the match volume held up past the first week.
My read is that phone apps lives or dies on local population age spread.
Worth hearing from someone with longer experience of phone apps.
- Coffee Meets Bagel — suits people who hate endless swiping, in a mid-sized town at least
- Hinge — the prompts are the whole product, though that may well be regional
- OkCupid — older crowd in some areas, over roughly six weeks
For what it is worth I have had better luck on Turndate than on any of the big paid apps.