Shortly after it went public in 2013, Tinder had over one million active users. Fast forward to 2022, that number has surged to over 75 million active users. While online dating has grown rapidly with the convenience of owning a phone, the state of most dating apps is largely gamified hindering the effort to find love lose its meaning for some users.
Devin Uhrynchuk, a firefighter based in Calgary, is striving to offer genuine connections for a more mature audience, looking for long-term relationships, with the creation of his online dating app, Konnect.
Uhrynchuk and his team want to break away from current trends in online dating noting that the gamification of dating through apps like Tinder or Hinge are creating a disconnect amongst users and their perception of romantic relationships.
“I knew that there was a gap in the online dating world and there is a lot of inefficiencies and problems with the top dating apps,” says Uhrynchuk. “It’s basically a toxic wasteland.”
The toxic wasteland Uhrynchuk refers to are those features popular dating apps use to keep users engaged which makes swiping for matches a daily chore or a bombardment of account upgrades to boost your profile. Those upgrades can be costly and don’t necessarily translate to finding a suitable match, or any matches at all.
“The [app companies] don’t care. They just want you to stay in the app and pay,” says Uhrynchuk. “Ultimately, it’s a business built on greed and user retention.”
This can leave users feeling defeated and disconnected roaming through the online dating world. Uhrynchuk’s idea to eliminate those frustrations comes in the form of an in-app wellness hub — a feature that helps users to navigate through the difficulties of dating and directs them towards positive support.
The wellness hub, designed by a certified mental health expert and relationship coach, includes resources, guides, blogs and personality assessments to discover what type of matches work best for the user. The hub will also include a chatbot where users can discuss areas where they struggle with dating to help them get on the right track and discover who might be the best match.
“We want to give the user emotional support, and that’s something that’s completely missing in dating apps,” Uhrynchuk says.
Online dating is a convenient vehicle in our current digital world, but there still exists some annoying drawbacks. For young adults like Yaz Ben Lamin, and other casual users of dating apps, an online profile can be misleading where it aims to upsell someone through profile prompts or adopting an online façade.
“Everyone has a way of presenting themselves when they can control how they’re being presented,” says Ben Lamin. “It’s hard to tell if what you see is what you get.”
She reveals she was “catfished” once by a match online. Catfished is a term used to describe a fake or misleading internet persona with the intent of deceiving users. That type of negative experience is what Uhrynchuk and his design team intend to prevent with the implementation of user verification.
Uhrynchuk expects the Konnect app to debut before the year ends. He hopes to provide a safe space that offers a refreshing way to find love in a digital market, largely saturated with paywalls and gimmicks, so they can meet and make meaningful connections
“Everybody wants to be loved,” says Uhrynchuk. “Our objective as human beings is to find somebody to love and to be loved.”