New Gay Dating App Revealed by Match Group – Meet Your Perfect Match on Archer!

online dating giant party group is introducing a new gay dating app, just in time for Pride. The company, which owns the largest share of the global dating market, is launching Archer, a “social-first” dating experience for gay, bisexual and queer men.

Archer won’t hit the App Store yet, that will happen a bit later this month. It launches in New York in June, with Los Angeles and DC lined up in the coming months and a full release in the rest of the US within the year.

While it’s a little surprising that Match Group, which owns everything from ok cupid and Tinder to BLACK and A lot of fish – It took so long to add a gay-specific app to its massive portfolio, Archer offers a few twists. Unlike gay hookup apps like Grindr, Scruff, and the like, Archer aims to blend the needs of dating apps (messaging, the grid, etc.) with traditional social media features designed to foster a ” deeper self-expression.

At launch, that includes interest tags, but Archer has near-term plans to add an Ephemeral Stories feature and the ability to follow other users — everything you’d expect on something like Instagram, but not necessarily a dating app. .

“We know that what someone looks for in a dating app really evolves by the hour, by the day, by the week.” Archer’s director of marketing and brand communications, Michael Kaye, told TechCrunch. “You may be looking for something on a Friday or Saturday night that is very different from what you might be looking for on a Tuesday afternoon or Sunday morning.

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To that end, the app also offers a few different views: a Grindr-style grid with two different zoom levels and a linear layout that gives users looking for love an in-depth view of one profile at a time. Overall, the app seems well-designed and flexible, aiming to meet the different needs of a busy and diverse dating community.

“When we first thought of Archer, we realized that relationships are very fluid within this community,” Kaye said. “So you could be single one day, then in a monogamous relationship, and then you could open up your relationship. So we wanted to make sure that whatever this app became, it would serve every stage of your life.”

Archer is yet another experience from corporate dating giant Match Group, and that pedigree comes along with an at least marginally less NSFW mentality. Instead of a sea of ​​torsos, Archer users will be required to display a profile photo that includes their face. (The Grindr founder similarly resent the sea of ​​headless menlaunching its own face-tracking app Motto first late last year). Archer uses selfie verification when signing up and each user’s profile photo, including face, will be verified, presumably through the same system as the Match Group apps. like tinder wear.

On the security front, Archer will also employ AI in its chat feature to automatically blur potential nudity, masking unsolicited dick photos for users who might not be collecting at the moment. The lack of torsos and relative paucity of penises certainly sets a different tone from what gay men mostly expect on hookup apps, but Archer is betting that his relatively (and literally) button-down approach will cast a bigger net. wide. That being said, he may still plan on sharing smoking torso pictures etc. via private photo albums, which can display up to six photos at a time and users can easily grant and revoke that access at any time through the app.

Critics of yet another Big Dating app might criticize these decisions for sanitizing the gay dating experience. That criticism is probably fair depending on what you’re looking for, but Archer seems to be designed with the unique needs of gay, bisexual, and queer men in mind. (And to his credit Archer lacks the Ongoing property concerns plaguing Grindralthough Match Group not free from privacy bugs.) That involved surveys, interviews, and product testing with more than 1,000 men from the community it seeks to serve, something you’d certainly expect a new gay dating app to do in hopes of building goodwill with an underserved community.

“There are a lot of men within the community who will date and move to a new city,” Kaye said. “I know many people who are in monogamous relationships, but downloaded gay dating apps when they first moved to New York to find their chosen family in the area. So we thought why not create a platform that makes it really easy for you.”

Archer might be serving a specific cross-section of the dating world, but it’s still trying to be a lot of different things to a lot of different people, an approach that may pay off in the end, particularly in light of its parent company’s total dominance. in the online world. dating scene Archer is betting that gay men might want to hook up, find love, build community and connect around shared interests in one single app. And they might be right, especially for anyone tired of the headless torso dating scene.