Can a new dating app break the Seattle freeze?
Sep 21, 2019, 6:52 AM
Dating in Seattle can be tough. (Pexels)
(Pexels)
Seattle consistently ranks as one of the hardest cities for dating, something a new app is looking to tackle.
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Aptly titled the “Seattle Dating App,” it launched Thursday on Android, and Friday on iOS. It allows users to sort by neighborhood, set your own personal schedule to let people know when you’re available, and in essence, work around the tendencies of a city whose unofficial motto is “we should totally hang out more!”
With preferences that allow you to set a preferred age range, availability to meet in neighborhoods you work and/or live in, and scheduling, that specificity also has the potential to function as a bit of a double-edged sword, namely in the realm of “telling complete strangers when and where you work and live.”
To the app developer’s credit, he addressed that in a recent “Ask Me Anything” session on Reddit.
“Safety and inclusion are paramount on the Seattle Dating App,” he said. “This exact issue came up when we were discussing how to size the neighborhoods. We tried to make each neighborhood large enough to provide anonymity, but small enough to make dating convenient. The app also features links to community resources for people struggling with difficult situations.
“Your location is never shared with other users on the Seattle Dating App,” he added. “The neighborhoods you pick may not be where you live, rather, those areas are the neighborhoods you prefer to date in.”
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Presumably, you’d still be picking neighborhoods based on the convenience of proximity to your work and home life, so take that for what you will. The app’s features were also chosen based on a series of polls the developer put to Seattle singles on Instagram, so it’s at least all stuff that was asked for by the majority.
“After exploring a number of concepts, I realized that the only way the app would work is if Seattleites picked the features and how the app should look,” the developer noted on Reddit. “I relinquished creative control of the app and decided to crowd-source the app’s design using Instagram polls.”
