The most popular dating apps seem to have a bot problem. Users manifest their dissatisfaction towards fake profiles and spam through the review section on the App Store and the Google Play Store. We picked the 15 most popular apps on both platforms and analyzed users’ opinions based on how often they mention certain keywords and which scores they provided.
Main Findings
Plenty of Fish is the most problematic app in terms of bots, scams and fake profiles. As a consequence of that, the percentage of very bad reviews is much higher than most other apps: 65% of App Store reviews and 32% of Google Play Store reviews are 1-star.
The apps with the worst average scores are eharmony (average 1.45 on the App Store) and Heyyo (average 1.8 on the Google Play Store).
The most popular app on the App Store appears to be Badoo. Aside from the small number of occurrences of keywords, 91% of the reviews are positive (4-/5-stars) with an average score of 4.59.
In the same position on Google Play, Dating Around’s reviews are 99% positive (5-stars) with a sky‑high average of 4.96.
Heyyo on the Google Play Store is an oddity. As far as number of reviews is concerned, it was only reviewed 5 times (as of November 7, 2019); four out of these five are 1-star. Despite this, it is the twelfth app to appear in the search results, indicating relatively high interest towards it.
It is worth noting that on the App Store, through Apple ID, users are not required to use their first and last names to sign their reviews; they can use pseudonyms or even fake names, which may allow them to feel that they can be “harsher” with their reviews.
On the other hand, the Google Play Store’s account system requires real first and last names (from a Google Account), so this may discourage some people from being too “blunt”.
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