Forget Tinder: This hot app wants to be your hookup for hooking up
Tinder may have rock solid reputation for being the hookup app, but there's a new player in town.
CasualX is an app that caters exclusively to people who want encounters with no strings attached. It's billing itself as “Tinder Minus Marriage-Minded Daters,” and it's available on both iOS and Android.
CEO Michelle Li founded the app after she noticed many of her friends in the market for simple hookups weren’t having luck. She noted in a statement, “Those who use Tinder to find partners for casual sex with no strings attached often find the experience confusing and frustrating when they are matched with people who are looking for serious relationships."
AdultFriendFinder — readers’ pick for casual connections
Hinge — popular choice for regular meetups
CasualX works much like the plethora of other dating apps, with standard swiping and matching functionality. However, it's only for people looking to hookup. Those in search of meaningful, long-term relationships that end in marriage and children need not apply.
In other words, it promises all of the pleasure with none of the messiness of having to suss out whether today's match could be “the one.”
Li told us one feature that makes it stand out from the crowd is "moments." Similar to any social media feed, it allows you to upload photos and thoughts and share them with other users. And you can see them when you look at anyone's profile.
Of course, as is to be expected with apps like this, scammers and fake profiles are a constant issue. To confront that, the CasualX team manually reviews each new profile to ensure there's a real person aiming to use the app properly.
Some of the behavior this app facilitates might not be things you’d want to share with, say, your mom or your boss. So they offer several features to protect your identity, such as private albums and a pattern lock, which is basically just a gesture password. You'll need to use the lock each each time you open the app.
CasualX obviously caters to a pretty specific segment of users. It calls for those who want “to meet couples and singles to have one night stands, friends with benefits, extramarital affairs, swinging or any other type of casual sexual relationship without commitment and emotional attachment.”
It's definitely working. In beta testing they amassed more than 50,000 users and generated at least 1,000 matches a day in their early stages. The app has a pretty positive score on the Apple store, with 400+ ratings giving it a 4.3 out of 5.
So, even though there are plenty of other apps that facilitate quick and easy encounters, there’s clearly a demand for something dedicated to purely casual connection that isn't Craigslist.
Cassie Murdoch is Mashable's Culture Editor.. Before coming here, Cassie was Senior Culture Writer at Vocativ. She previously wrote for Jezebel and The Hairpin. Cassie spends most of her time thinking about and consuming cheese in all its glorious forms.
