You may well be familiar with Tinder, even if you don’t publicly admit it. It’s the social matchmaking mobile app that allows its users to set a specific radius and have the option to match with anybody within that distance. Tappy on the other hand, you may not have heard of…..until now that is.
The reason why we’re telling you about Tappy is because Tinder have recently just purchased it. The app is created by a start-up called Chill who specialise in photo messaging that disappears within 24 hours. You can also message each other on the Tappy app, but the beauty is each conversation has to begin with a photo.
From there, you can turn that particular photo into a chat thread, with a single individual or a group. The inbox looks more like a newsfeed, with large screen-wide photos acting as the cover art for your various chats. It’s a fast app, in terms of both messaging and taking pictures, and features some of the best bits from Snapchat and Instagram to throw their hat in to the ring of text messaging.
Sean Rad, the CEO of Tinder, says Tinder and Tappy are a great match because both companies have similar ambitions. He told TechCrunch,
“We’re very good at connecting people, but there’s this ‘what happens after that?’ moment that we want to improve. We not only want to get better at the way we use criteria to connect people, but we want to broaden the reasons for connecting in the first place. The Tappy team will help us tackle both fronts, the pre-match experience of creating that first connection and the post-match experience of communicating with that person.”
Tinder has grown rapidly since it was launched in 2011, to such an extent that it is now seeing 1.5 billion swipes every day and 21 million matched. Growth certainly isn’t slowing any time soon and February is always a big month for dating apps, so it’s only a matter of time before they hit the 2 billion matches in the coming months. Brian Norgard, Tappy co-founder said of the decision to sell:
“I’m a bit of a historian when it comes to the Internet, and I know that things that grow like Tinder has don’t come around very often. The chance to work with Sean was too strong of a draw because we knew that if we could couple Tappy DNA with Tinder DNA that we can do awesome stuff. Messaging has gotten very overheated, and this gives us the chance to lead from the front.”
The acquisition is thought to be around the $10 million mark and the app will shut down immediately, leaving the users on the platform having to find a new favourite chat app.
Photo Source: By Tinder, Inc. (https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ficheiro:Tinder.png) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
