Your favorite dating app, Tinder, has made its first acquisition, buying a company and app called Tappy. Tappy is a messaging platform that wants to put an end to texting, replacing standard messages with photos. The app sounds a bit like Snapchat, but now it will be part of Tinder and let Tinder users send photo messages to one another from within the Tinder app.
Tappy lets users send messages to each other in the form of photos with the option to add text if you want. It’s a lot like Snapchat, but Tappy messages have a set time-frame and will expire after 24 hours. You can’t change that option. All Tappy messages expire after 24 hours. This makes the messaging service ephemeral and much more private than SMS and other messaging apps. Starting a chat thread is usually started with an image, and then you can start messaging with a single person of a group. Your inbox is set up kind of like a news feed and has large image previews that identify each chat for you. It’s not a Snapchat replacement so much as a combination of Snapchat and Instagram, with a 24 hour time limit on each message. Tappy launched in July 2014 and defines the app like this: “It’s like having a live chat room attached to your fun and wacky moments.”
Tinder is based in Los Angeles and is growing by leaps and bounds. The terms “swipe right” and “swipe left” have come to have meaning as terms of acceptance or rejection of a potential partner even outside of the app. Tinder’s co-founder and CEO Sean Rad said they want to improve interactions after the initial connection is made in Tinder. “We’re very good at connecting people, but there’s this ‘what happens after that?’ moment that we want to improve. We not only want to get better at the way we use criteria to connect people, but we want to broaden the reasons for connecting in the first place. The Tappy team will help us tackle both fronts, the pre-match experience of creating that first connection and the post-match experience of communicating with that person,” he told TechCrunch about the Tappy acquisition.