Hotline, the new dating app that makes you talk on the phone
Brace yourselves: There's a new dating app that requires you to kick things off with a potential match by sharing an actual phone call. Shudders. Passes out. Dies.
If the idea of having to speak to a stranger causes you to settle into a perma-cringe, you’re not alone -- but that friction is exactly the point of Hotline, which launched on Monday. A subscription will run you $9 a month, and right now it's only for iOS in New York, but the hope is that they'll expand nationwide soon.
This strangely old-fashioned idea is the brainchild of 27-year-old Sam Ballantyne, who was a classical musician before he turned his attention to developing apps. It came to him after someone he’d matched with on another app insisted on a call instead of messaging. He found it an oddly effective way of starting things off since you can tell pretty much right away if you’re interested in learning more about someone or not.
“Hotline wants you to stop swiping and start discerning,“ according to their press release. And when I spoke to Ballantyne, he stressed how keen he was to keep people from seeing their potential dates as commodities, which can be hard on the big apps where you’re matching with hundreds or even of thousands of people. That’s why he decided to limit the number of matches in Hotline to three at a time.
That may sound like nothing, but here’s how it works: you create a profile, which gives you a chance to offer more details than your average swipe-based app requires. You identify in any way you like, and add in images and even video -- a feature that many of the big apps don’t yet have. Ballantyne hopes all of this will allow people to showcase their realest selves.
You can swipe through profiles and like as many as you want. You’ll then be served up three matches, and until you discard one that’s what you’ve got to work with. You can still browse around but you can’t like anyone else until one of your three spots is open.
And now for the super scary part: the phone call. After you’ve matched with a potential love interest, you won’t be able to message them until after you two have a call that lasts for longer than five minutes. The calls are placed (and timed) by the app, so your phone number isn’t revealed to the other person.
Five minutes sounds like an eternity, especially if you hate to talk on the phone. But connecting voice-to-voice can actually tell you a lot about a person that you can’t get just from messaging. Ballantyne admits that a lot of the calls won’t work, but when they do work you’ll know you’re not wasting your time by making plans to meet up with someone.
You might still be curled up in a little ball at the thought of it all, but Ballantyne says that during their beta testing (which involved 500 users), the average call length was 25 minutes. (The longest lasted 40 minutes.) After a pair talked, there was typically a very low volume of messaging that followed, presumably because they’d either planned an in-person meeting or they realized there wasn’t much to say and moved on.
And that’s the main point of Hotline. You can text all day long, but until you actually talk to someone you don’t know whether there’s really something there. Your first interaction (whether it’s via phone or IRL) is going to be awkward no matter what, so you might as well save yourself time and get it out of the way first thing.
For many, it might feel like too much. It's an oddly personal experience to submit yourself to in an age when we've become accustomed to paging through potential soulmates in the same we browse around Seamless looking for dinner.
Then again nobody is enjoying the current system all that much, so maybe we're ready to find out if a real phone call is worth a thousand flirty emoji.
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.
