What Is Badoo and Who Uses It?

Badoo is a dating app where you find people near you and like the ones you want to meet. When the like is mutual, you get a match and can send messages. It is free to join and sells upgrades on top. The people who use it are ordinary adults looking for dates and company, and which kind you meet depends heavily on your city. Badoo publishes no breakdown of its members by age or gender, so we will not make one up. You can learn who is on it near you in about three days.

Badoo sits in the same family of dating apps as Tinder and Bumble. You sign up with a phone number, an email address or a Google account. The mobile app also accepts Facebook, and iPhones accept Apple. It asks for your name, your date of birth and your gender, and it asks who you would like to see. Then it asks for photos.

From there you find people two ways. Encounters shows one person at a time, and you tap the heart or pass. Discover lets you browse people near you in a grid. When two people like each other, the chat opens.

Bumble Inc.'s annual report to the SEC lists Badoo as a dating app and calls it the older of the company's two dating apps. It describes Badoo as one of the pioneers of free-to-use dating. It also says Badoo remains a market leader in several countries in Europe and Latin America.

Bumble and Badoo are sibling apps under one company, and neither owns the other. The report does not say how many members Badoo has in each country, how old they are, or how many are men and how many women. We found no such figure from Badoo, so we do not quote one. A forum comment that gives you a percentage is a guess.

What you can say with confidence is narrower and more useful. Because sign-up asks who you want to see, the crowd you meet is the crowd you picked. If you set women in a certain age range within a certain distance, those are the people the app shows you.

Some of them are active, serious and open to a date this month. Some opened the app once and have not been back. Some are on three apps at once. a dating coach's rule applies to Badoo as it does to every app: your results depend on whether the women on it really want to date. A busy app full of women who are not looking does less for you than a quiet one full of women who are.

A few of the accounts are not real people. Badoo's help center says a team works around the clock to watch for fake accounts and spam, and that an AI tool called Deception Detector flags scams, with human moderators behind it. That tells you the company knows fake accounts exist. It gives you no count of them.

The same app can be busy in one place and thin in the next. A man in a large city in Europe or Latin America may find Badoo full of women who answer, and a man in a different country may find it close to empty.

That is why men argue about it online and both sides are right. Each one is describing the place he lives. So the useful question is who uses Badoo within the distance you would really travel for a drink on a weeknight, rather than who uses it in general.

Do this with a free account and no payment.

1. Add your clearest recent photos, with your face in the first one, and finish the photo verification. A woman is more likely to trust a page that carries the blue checkmark.
2. Set a distance you would honestly travel and an age range you would take out.
3. Spend ten minutes a day in Encounters and Discover for three days.
4. Write down how many of the women look active. Recent photos and filled-in details are good signs. Check the dot beside each photo too: green means online now, red means within the last few hours, and grey means offline.

If most of what you see looks alive, run a full two weeks and count the women you liked, the chats that started and the dates you set. If most of it looks abandoned, you have your answer, and it cost you nothing.

Badoo suits a man who lives somewhere it is active. It suits a man who gives each card two honest seconds and hearts only the women he would be glad to hear from. a dating coach warns that an app treats a man who likes almost everyone as less attractive. It suits a man who is willing to move a good chat toward a plan within a handful of messages instead of collecting chats.

It suits you less if your city turns out to be quiet. In that case My advice is to run more than one app and let your own numbers decide. Keep the one that gives you real conversations and dates, and spend your evenings there.