Published 13:24 IST, February 1st 2019
Despite Valentine's Day inching closer and users asking for it, Facebook dating app is nowhere found in India
Valentine's day 2019 dating on Tinder, OkCupid, Facebook in India: Facebook initially announced plans to foray into online dating place at the company's F8 developer conference last year.
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Once again, Valentine's day is around the corner and for those who don't have a date this Valentine's day seems to have a pertinent question at hand. A question that's being asked by so many users, especially youngsters, who apparently have been flocking to Snapchat and Instagram, when does Facebook's dating app become available? Even amidst scandals and turmoil hitting Facebook from all corners for almost a year, the social media giant is building a dating app. But it's not here yet.
Facebook initially announced plans to foray into online dating place at the company's F8 developer conference last year. Since then, we have heard so little about its progress. In August, social media giant started testing its dating app internally with employees who have opted-in to dogfooding it.
In November, Facebook enabled early access to their dating product for select users in Canada, and one user who has tried Facebook dating even went as far as to describe her experience as "exhausting." Facebook has confirmed to The Verge they are testing it within Facebook's main app. Now, we know why is that the case.
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Recently, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confirmed their plan to merge WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, and since they are already merging these apps together, it's kind of obvious why Facebook isn't so keen on building a standalone dating app at this point. But it remains to be seen how it competes with some of its well-established competitors like Tinder.
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Facebook is also working on a meme app to woo youngsters but we don't know yet whether they want to integrate it too within the main app or come up with a whole new, stand-alone app altogether.
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Right now, we have no information on when Facebook dating will be available to all users in India, which has led daily users growth for Facebook in December quarter. It's pretty obvious that India is one of the key markets for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg can't afford to miss out on an opportunity to increase that growth rate even further by introducing Facebook dating app in India.
13:17 IST, February 1st 2019