You know, it’s been a pretty good few days for the (still mostly undercover) dudes behind Bang With Friends, the Facebook-powered app that aims to help you do exactly what its name implies.
Just days after word trickled out that the service was approaching its millionth user and that the team is purportedly in the middle of raising a million bucks, Bang With Friends has just launched its iPhone and Android apps.
If you’ve somehow missed all the Bang With Friends commotion, here’s all you need to know: Bang With Friends tries to help you find folks amongst your Facebook social circle who share a common interest. And by “common interest”, I mean a desire to shag each other. Once you log in, you privately select which friends (male or female) you’d be down to, well, bang. If the friends you’ve picked happen to pick you, as well, Bang With Friends will automatically connect you two online so that you can in turn connect offline. If there’s no match, however, no one is any the wiser.
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Until this morning’s launch, the service was pretty much entirely web-only. Given the nature of the service, it really makes a whole lot more sense as a mobile app.
Lets say you’re out on the town, hanging out with an old friend. Maybe it’s the wind in their hair; maybe you just never noticed how cute his or her laugh was before. Either way, you’ve got some new funny feelings rumblin’ down in the nethers.
Before today, you really only had two options: you could try to woo them with a nice steak dinner, maybe some bowling, and a Taylor Swift album* playing back at your place. Or you could wait ’till you got home and hope you remember to mark them as a would-be mate, fingers crossed that they use BWF as well.
(* I mean, I assume that’s how you crazy swingin’ singles do things. I’ve been with the same girl for a decade, I’ve got no damn idea how this stuff works anymore. And yeah — even though I gave the significant other a full heads up, testing this app felt like tip-toeing through a friggin’ minefield.)
With the new mobile apps, you could update BWF to reflect your new found feelings on the go. Technology!
The mobile apps bring over everything you’d expect from the original web app, but it’s also got two new features the team is testing:
- An Undo Button — It seems obvious, but there’s previously been no way to deselect a friend once you’ve declared yourself as DTF. With the mobile app, you just tap the button a second time
- An “Up For Hang” button — interested in hanging out with a certain someone, but maybe with, you know, clothes on? They’re using the mobile app to test an “Up For Hang”ing button that lets you indicate an interest in someone while startin’ things in the friendzone. (I think this is actually a bit of a misstep. Until now, the concept was very binary. You were interested in certain things, or you weren’t. This… complicates things.)
Surprised that Apple, occasionally known to be a bit prudish with their App Store, decided to greenlight this one? I am too, actually. Notice that the app actually has different names on each platform: on Android, it’s “BANG WITH FRIENDS (OFFICIAL)”, but on iOS, it goes by the ever-so-slightly more modest “BWF (OFFICIAL)”. You can find the Android build here, and the iPhone release here.
(Heads up: if you’re searching the Android store manually rather than following the above link, make sure you’re downloading the official app. There are about a half-dozen shady clones on the Play store.)