Let your iPhone find you a hot date

Going straight: the latest app for your iPhone is Grindr, currently only aimed at bisexual and gay men but soon available to all
Olivia Walmsley10 April 2012

It's Friday night. You're in a packed pub, scanning the crowd. You're single and searching for someone — The One, or maybe just a one-night stand.

Wave your mobile across the boozy throng and tags pop up on your screen, indicating who is looking and what exactly they're looking for. It's Minority Report meets London dating. Sounds unlikely, doesn't it? But it will soon become a reality.

There's already an iPhone dating app available called Grindr, which allows you to find out exactly how close the nearest available man is, using the GPS that most smartphones now include as a matter of course.

Download the app and scroll through a column of heads and torsos arranged in descending order of proximity.

If you like the look of a profile (flattering photos are a must — some things never change) you can instantly exchange flirty messages. Hit it off, nip around the corner and hook up immediately.

The service is exclusively aimed at bi and gay men at the moment — Stephen Fry is a
big fan — but the straight version is on its way.

Internet dating went mainstream a while ago: 15 million people in Britain are single, and almost five million are shopping for love online.

The next dating revolution is happening in your pocket, not at your desktop. And it's all about location, location, location.

Soon, Apple's iPhone and other touchscreen mobile devices will replace PCs as the main way we engage with social media, so the loveless among us will no longer have to sit glued to our computers, trawling profiles on dating sites.

The proliferation of user-friendly dating apps makes it easier than ever to find someone, right now, wherever you might be.

It's big business and growing all the time: in 2007 the global mobile dating market was pegged at £200 million, that figure rose to just under £332 million worldwide in 2008 and is expected to more than double over the next five years, reaching nearly £784 million by 2013. By the same year, subscriptions to mobile location-based social networking are predicted to reach 82 million.

Grindr, which launched in March this year, is presently most popular in San Francisco, with its dense concentration of gay men and iPhone customers, but gained more than 30,000 British users after Stephen Fry mentioned it on an episode of Top Gear. Clarkson was absolutely fascinated by the idea.

Grindr founder Joel Simkhai, 32, says he created the app to make finding gay guys easier: "Even if you're in a gay bar you're not totally sure who's actually gay. It's about finding the gay and bi guys who are around and available." Equally, "if you're straight, it's still hard to know who is actually looking for someone".

Joel says he gets hundreds of emails a month from people asking when he's going to start a straight version (early next year, he promises). It seems we're all eager to connect with the people on our doorstep — not an easy task in a city such as London.

"The goal with Grindr is to meet the people right under our noses at any particular moment. In cities, we all live in these solitary worlds, plugged into our iPods, tapping away at our phones. Why not harness the phone to reacquaint ourselves with our community?"

If you can't wait for non-gay Grindr to launch, don't panic.

GPS-enabled dating apps aimed exclusively at the straight market have just arrived, StreetSpark, Skout and Are You Interested being some of the latest.

"It's all about immediate gratification," says Skout CEO Christian Wiklund.

"If you feel like going on a date that night, you log into the system, which knows your exact location. Photos of users who meet your basic requirements and are in the area pop up on the screen."

But, he continues: "Skout is not meant to replace how we meet people online or in the real world, but to marry the two scenarios into a new experience that will increase your likelihood of finding someone special."

So now imagine that your app hooks you up with "someone special". If you're a New Yorker (and a particularly nosy type) you can tap your date's name and telephone number into the Date Check app while he's at the bar to find out if he's got any nasty little secrets.

The app conducts a background search, looking up criminal records, indicating if he owns property and what the value is and telling you who else lives at his home.

Hopefully, he doesn't live with his mother. Things go well and you spend the night together.

Then it's time to download Passion, a new app that uses the iPhone's microphone, accelerometer and various other features to determine an accurate "score" for your sexual activity.

It's a brave new dating world out there — just make sure you disable the GPS while you're actually on your date, or you could be in trouble.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in