Well that was quick. Bang With Friends, the controversial Facebook app that lets you privately nominate who in your friends network you want to hook up with and alerts you if they feel the same, has got itself some competition. Would Love 2 has emerged with a similar proposition: After downloading the iOS app, you select who you’d like to date from your Facebook contacts and add your selection to the app’s ‘locker’. This information is then kept private until such time when the recipient of your undeclared admiration puts you in their ‘locker’, at which point the app declares a match and sends you both an iOS notification. What you do with that information is up to you, of course, although undoubtedly there are a number of ephemeral messaging apps that can help with that, too.
But joking aside, despite having similar functionality it would seem that Bang With Friends and Would Love 2 come from two slightly different places. The former is U.S.-based, and while little is known about the Facebook app’s makers it’s been reported that they are Californian college-age males — and certainly the frat boy-esque language of the app speaks to this. In contrast, Would Love 2 is a UK-based startup and the brain child of female entrepreneur Phillipa Adam. It’s pitched very differently, too. Instead of offering to “anonymously find friends who are down for the night”, Would Love 2 claims to be “taking the rejection out of dating”, which sets a very different tone. In fact, the language of both apps couldn’t be further apart.
Another key difference is that Would Love 2 is sexual preference agnostic, whereas Bang With Friends has been heavily criticised for catering for heterosexual dating only at launch, something that its makers have had to backtrack on, with an update said to be in the works.
Would Love 2 also predates Bang With Friends, though not in its current form. It was originally tentatively launched last November as iLove FB, but has since been rebranded and tweaked in terms of UI and pitch, with this week’s iOS app the result. Interestingly, monetization is via charging £0.69p as an in-app purchase for each successful match.
But with the rapid rise of Bang With Friends and the tsunami of publicity the U.S. rival has gotten, it’s fair to say that Would Love 2 has some serious catching up to do. Bang With Friends has set the benchmark at a reported 30,000 ‘installations’ in about a week since launch, with 10,000 matches being made through the app, apparently.