How Badoo has been ruling the online dating space for over a decade

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Badoo is the world’s most downloaded dating app with more than 350 million users and growing, making it one of the go-to apps for social discovery and meeting new people.

Founded in 2006 by the London-based company, Badoo has been a mainstay in online dating for many years and has been constantly tweaking and refining its app. Earlier this year it rolled out its redesigned free mobile app for its millions of users with an improved and revitalised user experience for interacting with others and finding a match.

Badoo has a wide reaching global userbase and its largest demographic is young adults between the ages of 25 and 35. This makes finding a match much easier while keeping things simple by putting user experience and safety front and centre.

There are two main ways of finding a match, depending on what works best for you. Users can turn to the swipe function, now a familiar feature in the online dating market, or browse a list of people in nearby locations. Users can see who else has viewed or liked their profile and users can chat with more than one person at a time to increase their chances of finding a match. The app handles hundreds of millions of messages a day.

While this expansion has been impressive, the app hasn’t sacrificed trust and safety for the ever-growing user base. Badoo put a lot of effort into checking people are actually who they say they are.

Catfishing, where a user poses as someone else or misrepresents their true identity, is a serious concern for online dating users and Badoo has implemented a number of safety and verification features to address these concerns. Users are encouraged to both verify who they are and use a recent profile picture as a true representation of themselves.

Users can choose to only message with profiles that have been verified. There are multiple ways to verify your account; you can sign up via your Facebook profile, you can verify by phone message with Badoo and you can also use photo verification where users can take a selfie with a specific gesture that will be approved by a moderator. You will now find a verified check mark on your account.

There’s a further safety mechanism found in the Selfie Request feature where you can ask for an up to date picture of the person you’re chatting with for greater assurance. Users do have the option to message people that they have not been matched with but there is a two-message limit on messages that receive no reply. This is to curtail any abuse or harassment.

Today more than 350 million people in 190 countries and in 47 languages have put their trust in Badoo.