Over the last couple weeks, Happn has caught the attention of The Ubyssey staff as something that could potentially surpass Tinder and become the official dating app of Vancouver — or at least it is marketed that way. Now with over 400,000 members throughout the city, this product seems like a phenomenon ready to happen (pun intended). Unfortunately, even with an interesting and creative concept, Happn fails to deliver at its core.
How does it work?
Happn is basically Pokemon Go meets Tinder. When you open the app, you get the option of using your Facebook or Instagram photos to set up your profile. Choose a couple of pictures, write a nice description, edit your sex and age preferences and you’re ready to go — literally.
This app requires you to do some walking. I recommend that you open it in the morning and leave it running as you go through your day. After some time, you will begin to see profiles appearing on the main screen. These are the people who you have crossed paths with during the day. You then have the option to view their profile, read their descriptions, see things in common as well as the exact location you two crossed paths. With that info, you can either press the heart — meaning you like this person — or the X — meaning you do not. If both of you mutually like each other, it will open a chat bar on the right. If you are not getting any answers, you can always send a charm. A charm is basically like a romantic poke, telling the person that you are indeed interested in them. The first 10 charms are on the house, but the rest require credits (one credit = one charm, starting at $2.79 for 10 of them).
I tried this app for two weeks, setting my profile to girls and crossing paths with over 40 users, liking every profile purely for research sake. Everything seemed to move along very smoothly until I realized one glaring issue — I got zero matches.
At first, I thought this was simply because I might need to use my charms, so I did. I used up all of the 10 charms that I got for downloading the app and I still did not get a single match. This might be down to two very critical issues:
1. I’m an ugly fuck.
2. Nobody is using this app.
Now, I don’t know about you, but probability would definitely rule out the first option after going through 40 people. Ergo, I believe that people are not really using this app in any committed way. But then why did I see so many profiles of people if they are not using the app? To hopefully confirm my theory, I decided to do a bit of an experiment — setting the app to match with both men and women.
The result was that I crossed paths with 18 more people (the 40 girls plus 18 guys), and still — even by liking every single profile — I did not get a single match. This settles a lot of my doubts regarding Happn. I can only conclude the following — UBC students do not use it. They might download and play around with it for a few days, but the patterns shown so far demonstrate that a lot of these profiles are largely inactive, making the statistics about its usage somewhat superfluous.
Happn might have an interesting and appealing concept, but if its lack of popularity does not change, it will never be anything more than just a repackaged alternative for Tinder.
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