Published on 12, July, 2020
Morning, morning. I stumbled upon a dating app (swipe left etc. until you find someone you're a match with). It's designed for autistic people allegedly. It's called Hiki. Does anyone have any experience of using the app? Can autistic people even have successful relationships!? I'm sceptical, because I'm useless at them. When I joined I immediately thought it was a mistake and as I reply to messages, I can't help but think it's a fool's errand. I'd love to think that there were some success stories... (even for an undatable like me).
I'm new here do you know if it would be a good site to find somebody to date? I got diagnosed with autism just got diagnosed with ADHD about 6 months ago. Never really dated anyone before but I want to give it a try.
Thank you, BJS. I'm sure that's entirely possible. There's no way of telling who is registered on it and I've already seen a couple of fake profile pictures pulled straight off the internet!
That's partly what the app is about too, allegedly, Peter. You have an option to say whether you are looking for friendship or a relationship (or both). It remains to be seen whether this is in fact true.
I should add not on this app you asked about, they actually started talking on reddit somehow.
Someone my mum works with in the UK just started a relationship with someone from America. They spoke for a while online and he moved here so it's not impossible.
This is the thread https://community.autism.org.uk/f/adults-on-the-autistic-spectrum/22872/hiki-app/193411#193411
Someone posted about this app a while ago, she said she was basically stalked by a couple of users and the app developers did nothing to stop it, so be careful
Personally instead of an app for autistic people I’d make an app for people who want to meet other people who share their interests. I find it far easier to make connections with others who share my interests so I think most autistic people would to.
Yeah I often thought about this. You see I could code a better app than this … but the real challenge is popularising it. That and the expence of maintaining back end servers.
Hi Peter, it does throw up matches from Argentina and North America, which I thought was a little useless, but my location properly and with a realistic catchment area, there is no one around!
As far as I know it suffers from the same issue every small dating app suffers from, a lack of users. There are really 2 ways to build up location based user to user interaction apps. Either you you blitz the world with a huge global marketing campaign or you lock it into one geographical zone and do a localised marketing campaign.
the mistake a lot of these apps make is they cast their marketing net way too wide for the initial launch compared to the funds they have. It’s far better to blitz a city or a few cities with heavy marketing than cover a whole country with poor marketing. You need to get a lot of users in one place to get apps like this going.
then each time you open the app up to a new area you blitz the area with a huge marketing campaign to get over that initial hurdle of getting enough people on the app in a given area to make the app with using.
otherwise people form a negative view of the app as being empty of users (as so many are) and are less likely to go back to it later to check if it’s filled out in their area.
hopefully at some stage viral marketing takes over and lots of cities start demanding to be added to the app. But initially at least you need to go city by city.