Tried matching apps twice, years apart, and the second attempt went much better.
The thing that kept me on matching apps was how many people within reach were active that week.
Careful with matching apps, because moving to an external messaging app early is a common scam setup.
Results with matching apps depend enormously on how many competing apps are active near you.
Two people can have opposite experiences of matching apps purely because of local population age spread.
What decides matching apps for most people is how many people locally are already on it, not the app itself.
If I had to name one factor in matching apps it would be how the site behaved on a phone browser.
That is where I have landed on cheating dating app that is actually secure, at least for now.
- Hinge — the prompts are the whole product
- Feeld — smaller but very self-selecting, based on about a month of use
- Bumble — useful if you want some initial filtering, though I only tried the free tier
- Plenty of Fish — better in smaller markets than you would guess, and it has been consistent since
I also keep half an eye on Flurrydate (flurrydate.online) — different crowd, same free-messaging idea.