Writing about the things that I do, occasionally I get asked to review adult industry-adjacent products. This is especially delightful when the subject being reviewed is a new vibrator. I had a lot of fun prancing around in a lingerie set one time. And I can’t forget the THC-infused seltzer that led to a particularly fun evening. I could have used a few of those seltzers this week in order to cope with the latest product I was asked to review: the LoveJack dating app.
How the makers of this glitchfest found out I’m single, I have no idea. But I am, and they were persistent, so I decided to give it a go. I should have gone with my gut instinct of taking a book to a bar and looking like I wanted to be left alone, because the time I spent trying to use the LoveJack app is time I will never get back.
Listen, I wanted to like it. I really did. The entire premise of the app is that users are only allowed to use five words in their bios. They can be any five words, but that’s the limit. The makers of LoveJack claim that this is due to the app being intended for word nerds who are looking for love. I write for a living. I’m a word nerd. Well-spoken people are gonna turn me on at least a little, that’s just a fact.
However.
See also, as a single woman in the dating market who has been burned by dating apps before, I have ZERO interest in a dating app that makes it that easy to dupe vulnerable people into believing that you’re engaging with the real deal. Mr. Goes To Therapy can easily drop a few buzzwords that he learned from his last therapist (before she fired him for not actually wanting her professional services so much as he just wanted her to make him feel good about being a douche due to being an “Alpha”) and convince some unsuspecting woman that he really is about “empathy, transparency, connection, authenticity, and commitment,” when really all he’s looking for is his next live-in maid/mommy combo. Gamifying your interests and core values sounds hip and all, but it actually opens the door to a very easily manipulable system that will allow bad actors to continue exploiting lonely people looking for a genuine connection.
The people behind LoveJack put so much time and energy into marketing the app, and seemingly very little into actually building a product worth using. Just one example: if Olive (my assistant) and I did a shot every time we read the phrase “wordplay foreplay” in the copious amounts of marketing materials we read for LoveJack, we would have been blitzed 15 minutes into our morning check-in.
The practical usability of the app also is… non-existent. When I went to upload my preferred profile picture, the app crashed and sent me back to the home screen. So I tried again… same thing. I went to check the app store and see if there had been an update since the app had been released the week prior. Nada. That’s when I noticed something else interesting. While looking for available updates to the app, I noticed that there were already reviews for this glitchy-ass dating app that I was still hoping to try out, so I read them.
Dear reader, if those SEVENTEEN five-star reviews weren’t all written by some kid on Fiverr, then I’m Taylor Swift.
All in all, I have to say that I prefer Tinder, and I don’t love Tinder. If you’re going to create a dating app with a target market of intellectual word nerds, please do more beta testing next time. Or maybe, I don’t know, consult people who are actually in the dating market right now, and then get to work building a product that has things that people actually asked for instead of “Scattergories, but make it dating.”
