As we approach Valentine’s Day, many people are searching for love, or just companionship, and many of them are using dating apps to help in that search. Hundreds of millions of people use dating apps worldwide, and the sector generates billions of dollars in annual revenue.
Tinder remains one of the dominant dating apps. There are still plenty of competitors, including niche apps that focus on alternative dating experiences. Many users engage with more than one dating app. This means they are already well positioned to drop services that don’t live up to expectations.
As they swipe away, most users don’t stop to think about the invisible foundation of IT infrastructure that makes these apps possible. This includes data centres, network connections, cloud services, and more. And the better that infrastructure is, the better the user experience will be.
Of course, data centres don’t control the quality of profiles you’ll find on any particular app. But what they do control is how quickly and reliably you can find and connect with other users. There are many steps that have to happen between a swipe and a match, and all those steps happen in and around data centres.
Love is local, and so is dating app infrastructure
Dating apps require robust infrastructure at the digital edge, meaning the places with high concentrations of end users. That’s because they need low-latency connectivity to prevent delays and ensure the quality of the user experience. Since latency is an inevitable byproduct of distance, keeping latency low requires proximity between end users and the digital infrastructure that supports the app.
When they make a match, users want to receive the alert as quickly as possible, from wherever they’re using the app. If data takes too long to move from the device to a distant data centre or cloud region and back again, the delay could frustrate users and push them toward a different app.
Dating tends to happen within cities. The swiping model popularised by Tinder is based on the simple idea that you should be able to match with someone who lives near you, start chatting in a matter of seconds, and potentially even meet in person soon after. Because the user base for dating apps is concentrated in highly populated areas, these apps need digital infrastructure and services in those same locations. Without proximity, a high-quality user experience would be impossible.
For instance, if two users are based in Singapore, and the data centre that supports the app is also in Singapore, then their data never has to leave the local area. This helps keep latency low, allowing the users to make a match in real time.
On the other hand, if the data centre were located elsewhere, it would create a “hairpin” scenario, where traffic has to move long distances to reach the data centre and then long distances back to the device. In this situation, latency would be a serious issue, and delays would be inevitable.
App providers need access to distributed digital infrastructure to ensure they’re able to support users in all the different cities they operate in.
Inside the dating ecosystem
Getting close to users in many different cities isn’t easy. When app providers deploy inside an interconnection hub, they’ll be able to quickly find and connect with many different ecosystem partners that can help them. For instance:
- Mobile network providers help ensure always-on connectivity for end users from wherever they may be.
- Content delivery networks (CDNs) provide edge servers that cache app data close to users, helping deliver low latency.
- Social media platforms provide login and authentication services and allow users to share photos and other content from their social profiles.
- Payment service providers help monetise the apps.
It may not seem very romantic, but dating algorithms are not that different from any other recommendation algorithm. Instead of matching a listener with a song or a shopper with a product, they match two people who are looking for dates. The algorithms achieve this by pulling information from user profiles, examining who a person is and what they’re looking for in a date. They use this information to determine what a good match might look like for each user, and then search other profiles to find such a match.
Once the app makes a match, it uses cloud messaging services to notify users and allow them to start chatting with one another instantly. This messaging requires low latency, or users may get frustrated and try a different app instead.
And of course, no dating app would be possible without cloud providers. Most of these apps take advantage of flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure to host their dating platform core, which includes the APIs, algorithms, and messaging services that make matching possible.
