Badoo

Badoo's listing calls itself the app "designed for making real, genuine connections" and then spends most of its length on the apparatus around that: filters, prompts, intentions, in-chat games. It is a dating app and says so plainly, and it is unusual among the four reviewed here for how much room it gives to safety — a section with named tools rather than adjectives. The page also discloses its corporate parent, which is rare: Bumble Inc., it states, is the parent company of Bumble, Badoo and Fruitz.

You build a profile and the app offers several ways to start from there: shared intentions tell you what the other person is after, "chat before you match" lets you talk before committing to anything, filters narrow the search, and in-chat games break the ice. Video chat is among the features, framed as a way to get to know people better and faster, and the listing says you can switch between message chats and video calls. There is also a social wrinkle specific to Badoo: your profile can be checked out by an approval committee made up of your friends on the app.

The app is free and the listing says so more than once, in the confident register of a page that also has something to sell. Premium Plus is where that appears: boosts, sending a crush to start a chat, revealing who already liked you, undoing a "no", unlimited filters, priority on your messages, going incognito and removing ads. The split is worth reading closely, because several of those change who can find you rather than how you look to them — incognito and unlimited filters are reach, not decoration.

This is the strongest safety section of the four apps reviewed here, and it is strong because it names behaviours. A Safety Space collects guides, tools and helplines. Photo verification checks that people are who they claim to be. Private Detector flags and initially blurs inappropriate pictures. A rude message detector covers chats with strangers. A selfie request lets you confirm someone is still who they said they were before meeting in person. And block, report and unmatch is the baseline control. Two of those — the blurring and the selfie request — are specific enough to be checkable, which is more than the adjectives elsewhere in this category offer. The listing does not describe an age requirement.

People who want to date and want the safety apparatus spelled out before they sign up, and who would rather have an approval committee of friends than decide alone. The interest filters and the "chat before you match" flow suit someone who finds swipe-then-match too blunt.

The dating app here that treats safety as a feature list rather than a feeling, and the only one whose paid tier is described in terms of who can reach you. The named protections — image blurring, the rude message detector, the selfie request — are concrete in a category that usually is not. The costs are the usual ones for a dating app: the filters that matter sit behind a subscription, and the listing names no age requirement.