MUSL: Case Study of Gay Dating & Social Application Development

A new type of app for the way you always
wanted a gay app to work.
Find a FRIEND, find a FLIRT, find some FUN

MUSL app
users photos
introduction

Product Concept

With MUSL you have up to 3 different profiles — each in their own community.
Friend — find new buddies, Flirt — find a new date, Fun — find a new play partner.
Once you connect with a member your other profiles are automatically blocked from him. In doing so, you get to decide what and when you share more of yourself with that person.

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Ideation process

The Story Behind

MUSL’s mission is to create a more trusted, well-lit social app experience and allow users to find a pair for flirting, friendship, social network, and other fun. So boys don’t have to puzzle over date ideas anymore.
Since your profile is seen by guys looking for the same type of relationship you no longer have to waste your time weeding through profiles trying to find guys looking for the same type of connection/ relationship. And when your mood changes, you can easily switch between your hookup or FUN profile to your FRIEND profile with a simple swipe.

Keep reading to learn more about obstacles and outcomes in our case study of a gay dating app.

Jason Kelly

Founder & CEO @ MUSL
Ideation process

Goals & Objectives

Our team had to create a solution that would meet both business and user needs in the market, where user problem used to solve in different way for many years

Profile management

MUSL has a uniquely modern approach to handle user communication — it provides 3 different types of profiles with deep synchronization within which definitely was a technical challenge.

Matching Algorithm

The application has a matching algorithm that works in connection to 3 different profile types. AI recognizes a range of traits & suggestions the best potential matches for each active user.

Anonymity & Security

One of the main points for MUSL was providing the users with strong anonymity & security features allowing a unique experience on the product which we were doing by closely following the rules.

Technical challenge

AI implementation, 3-way profile management structure & matching algorithm adaption, deep anonymity & security implementations were among the challenges when developing MUSL.

App Development process

Design & Development Overview

Here is how we handled the
development from day 1.

Gay dating mobile app development
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Application Development

Development Process

Development technlonogies
React Native Kotlin
Start of the app development

To develop a gay dating app we started with implementation of the admin panel to view users on the product, be able to block them & perform basic admin panel functionalities on them. That’s the part we got familiar with the API — MUSL was not written from scratch by our team, we took it over from the other one with 0 support from them due to the strong disagreeables with the client of ours.

Admin panel completion

The admin panel was developed with React using the existing API of the service which was written using Kotlin. The whole application was developed through React Native and was at a certain completion point when we got it in our hands — however, it had many bugs & issues which needed to be fixed.


After the implementation of the admin panel, a decision was made to rewrite the existing backend for the application & re-integrate it into the product.

dating feed
dating feed
Application Development

Challenges

1. Lack of support from previous development team

We had no support whatsoever from the previous development team when rewriting the backend of the product from scratch & re-integrating it into the app.

2. Issues & bugs in existing product

The project had a range of issues & bugs we had to deal with — it was unfinished and the backend was not connected properly to the application functionalities

3. Lack of proper architecture implementation

The frontend of the app was not architectured properly which resulted in lots of spaghetti code present on the app — we were coping with it & making sure the proper architecture would be installed to make the product extendable & scalable.

application development

Technical Implementation

PHP was chosen as a backend language — we had an engineering team that was familiar with both Kotlin & PHP backend development to successfully perform the transition.

Technical Implementation
MUSL application

ReactPHP was used as a framework for backend PHP development due to the compatibility with React Native based frontend.

We decided to leave the current React Native implementation of mobile frontend in place & switched to MVVM reactive architecture to establish seamless communication between frontend & backend and real-time reactive UI updates based on data coming from API requests.

MUSL application
user profiles

Matching algorithm was re-implemented on the backend & connected through a reactive programming approach with frontend UI using React Native libraries & ReactPHP.

Application Development

User Profiles

One of the biggest challenges with new backend implementation was to setup & test proper workflow with 3 different user profiles & matching algorithms. It was a major milestone through the development process which got completed in several sprints following the Scrum sprint lifecycle model.

user profiles user accounts
new messages from users

A range of non-trivial social features was present in the product such as an option to send a notification to the user while blocking the sender’s two profiles non-active for the receiver.

Application Development

Social Aspect

Through the development of the project, we made sure again that functional react programming was a great choice for both backend & frontend implementation due to lots of notifications, messages, and events happening on the app and a requirement to properly display this information to the user in the real-time.

users photos user accounts
application development

Matching Algorithm

Being able to pick a range of profile details and change them on the profile section was a challenge for matching AI algorithm implementation — we had a number of variable & enter points to work with based on the matching engineer inputs & outputs.

choice of interests
user profile description

We’re still working on AI on a daily basis improving different parts of the algorithm while adding new functionalities & profile traits into the product.

We took a model based on TensorFlow and were feeding it with dummy data before transferring it into the live version of the product — making sure that the user experience will be unique while using the services & looking for matches.

profile completion
App Development

Mobile App Design & Development

Our team aims to deliver world-class mobile applications for famous & trusted B2B & B2C providers across different industries over the globe. Click the button below to see more case studies.

Create a gay social dating app
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outcomes & Feedback

Product Completion

Outcomes

The backend was rewritten within several months of work, we were also fixing issues on the front-end adding some new functionalities alongside, migrating the old database to new AWS instances & setting up admin panels to work properly with the new backend.

Future Plans

We’re developing a version of the app for straight individuals at the moment — the concept with several different profiles is revolutionary and might benefit a range of demographics including the privacy & security MUSL has at the moment. We’ll be using a similar backend implementation on the straight version of the project.

download from the app store

Jason Kelly

Founder & CEO @ MUSL

“I love them. I can not say it enough. Without question, I never once was concerned about their honesty, work ethic nor capabilities. I would give the workflow a 10 out of 10. Communication, expertise, willingness to complete the project at the set bid. When a deliverable took longer than they expected they did not charge for their over hours. This was fantastic.”

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