She also feels that Hinge isn’t immune from the same problems as other apps – after two dates with a man she thought had gone well she was ghosted. “So far, so typical,” she says. “I’d be keen to get the user base up, and also to get people messaging more, and getting off the app and out into the real world!”
The biggest advocate of Hinge we spoke to, was Maya*, 23, from Surrey who started using the app in August and has already found herself with a boyfriend.
Failing to click with other apps like Bumble because of the type of people she was meeting on there – “it just seemed to be white city boys” – she decided to download Hinge. It no longer works that way.
“I wasn’t going on dedicated Hinge benders, it was just casual,” she says. “I never had that kind of stomach flip from a kiss before. I get it every time I look at him, which is gross but also really fucking nice.
“I guess I never thought I could click with someone I met on an app the way I have done; I felt app dating was a placeholder for me, to meet as many people as possible and learn about what I wanted from my romantic relationships.”
As well as delivering on its promise of dates, Maya was impressed by the layout of Hinge. “It’s extremely sleek and mixes the photo aspect of Instagram with the question element of OK Cupid. There’s no long bios, just three questions alongside five photos. Plus you can include vital info like height, political opinion and your habits i.e. whether you smoke or do drugs.”
But Emily Hennings, 24, from Peckham, said she found the layout very fiddly and hated Hinge from the word go. “It felt like more work than it needed to.
“Dating is already an effort, I don’t want to have to take 20 minutes to look at a profile,” she says. “I tried it and spoke to a handful of people but the app was just too difficult and I got bored.”
Hennings says she wouldn’t recommend Hinge and hasn’t witnessed much success from it. “Even my friend who recommended it thought she had found her one true love, but they never met up. ”.
After an 18-month relationship with a man from Tinder ended and she was ghosted by another man, Maya says it was time to try something new
The other glaring issue raised by users was the fact that the app allows you to set ‘ethnicity preference’ filters when you create your profile. Users have a choice between saying they are ‘open to all’ ethnic backgrounds, or specifying those that are ‘dealbreakers’.
But within a week Maya had met a new man who, when we speak, she has been dating for two months
Maya said: “Racial preference filters should always be a no go. Being able to reinforce the prejudice we excuse with ‘preference’ or ‘my type’ is a terrible idea and only increases segregation or fetishising in dating.”
HuffPost UK has contacted Hinge for comment on the ‘racial preference filters’ but has yet to receive a reply. This article will be updated with a response.
And 39-year-old Lucy* said this small group of https://datingranking.net/local-hookup/lincoln/ people has been a long-standing problem on Hinge. Joining two years ago, she is one of the earliest Hinge adopters we spoke to. “Then, as now (to a lesser extent) there were not many users, so I didn’t get many dates,” she says.