5 things to consider when creating dating apps

It goes without saying that the use of dating apps has increased. If you dive deeper into various researches and reports, you’ll see that the industry is only gaining momentum. The annual revenue of all dating apps is estimated at around $2 billion.

IBISWorld states that the dating service market has shown 11% annual growth over the past five years. In 2019, the total revenue reached $3B in the US alone.

More people prefer to meet online and become picky when choosing a dating app. There’s no denying that Tinder has changed dating drastically by offering a seamless user experience and server performance. If you think that the dating websites and apps market is oversaturated, well, it’s not. The market is growing, as well as the customers’ demands. Therefore, if you want to create a new online dating platform, this is the right time. All you need to do is to сome up with a fresh and valuable idea of a product, choose your niche, and prepare your business strategy well. In this article, consider technical issues that are not always obvious. Here, I cover a few tech aspects in terms of their importance for online dating platform development.

1. Keep security a priority

Like in any other app, security is the main concern for all users. Mobile dating apps are no exception. For successful online dating platform development, you should look through the security concerns first. To guarantee that user data remains protected from hackers and fraudulent, follow a short yet effective security checklist:

Profile verification

Registering new users or authorizing new user login is a vital step for dating apps. Since online dating platforms imply private messengers, it’s crucial to ensure that users are confident in the privacy of chats and the absence of data leakage. Profile verification methods should be there to avoid fake profiles or have an option to link social media to validate that the user profile is authentic.

Consider penetration testing

You can’t be sure when and how hackers might attack your backend systems, hack your mobile dating app, and steal the users’ data. To mitigate possible risks and anticipate undesirable scenarios, you can foresee the intentions and behaviors of hackers and detect errors and bugs in the code to fix them before hackers break down your system.

Penetration testing is the practice of security tests designed to detect vulnerabilities that an attacker could exploit. This is an integral part of the digital product development process. During penetration testing, our quality assurance engineers simulate a “remote attack” using sophisticated tools and expertise to discover weaknesses and identify areas where your security posture needs improvement.

Match with the right payment provider

When you want to accept payments on your dating website and apps, you need to consider many things. It could be time-consuming to find the best solution for your business, but it’s worth it. Most online dating platforms prevent users from revealing their personal details, such as email address, phone number, etc., from feeling secure. The industry comes with lots of fraud attempts, so providing solutions with the highest level of security is paramount. For high-risk businesses (like online dating), it’s better to have a dedicated merchant account and work with a payment provider with experience in this field.

Choose a reliable hosting

Online dating platforms are at a high risk of being hacked. The security of such platforms starts at the host. A secure hosting company with an attractive authentic reputation should be used for hosting any web application.

2. Think of scalability in advance

With dating apps, it is hard to anticipate the peak load in advance. They may face huge influxes of users or a decrease in traffic. Some of the loads can be predictable (when you launch a certain marketing campaign), some may be unpredictable, such as if your ad went viral in social media or you set up a successful marketing partnership, or the entire world entered a complete lockdown. You might need to scale your app to suit the growing or fluctuating demands based on the platform load. You can easily opt for an increased or decreased cloud capacity per your business requirements, thus giving you more flexibility for scaling seamlessly to varying loads.

3. Logging & monitoring: you need both

Logging and monitoring are like eggs and bacon. The two go well together, just like any other famous combinations you can think of — similarly, logging and monitoring complete each other well. The purpose of logging is to create a record of application events. Log files can be used to review any event within a system, including errors and any users’ complaints. Consequently, log messages can provide valuable information to help uncover the cause of performance problems. Monitoring is an umbrella term that can include many facets of system evaluation. It tells you if your system is working. Using a combination of logging to collect and review data and monitoring tools to track metrics offers a comprehensive view of your system’s availability along with detailed insights to help solve any customer experience issues more effectively.

4. Cross-platform development

A cross-platform application is a universal solution that is supported by several mobile platforms at once. Cross-platform frameworks “fit” an application to multiple operating systems, so there is no need to create unique elements for each platform, thus providing a better and consistent user experience.

5. Support of the affiliate programs

Simply put, affiliate programs are arrangements in which an online dating platform pays affiliate websites a commission to send them traffic. These affiliate websites post links to the dating app and are paid according to a particular agreement. This agreement is usually based on the number of people the affiliate sends to the dating platform or the number of people they send to perform other actions. Affiliate programs are essential during the early stages of development. It’s essential to prepare the system so that it’s ready for an increase in traffic. Another challenge when developing online dating platforms is continuously monitoring affiliate marketing traffic quality and fraud prevention.

Technology stack which helps in dating apps development

The technology package of dating websites and apps requires expertise. Think about this for a moment: dating apps are still social media apps. The maintenance of high load on the platform, responsibility for the security of users’ sensitive data, and providing a good user experience with the system are those factors that define extreme importance to approach tech stack and testing thoughtfully. Below are mentioned the use of technologies that will streamline the dating app development process.

Mobile app stack

• Swift
• Java/Kotlin
• Flutter

Backend/API stack

• Node.js
• Ruby/Rails
• Redis
• AWS/Azure/DigitalOcean
• Python

Website stack

• ReactJS
• AngularJS
• HTML5

Payment gateway

• Stripe
• Authorize.net
• PayPal

The market will need a reload to make online dating better, safer, and efficient in the years to come. If you have an idea for a dating app, let’s build it together.