Pink Triangle Press is Canada's leading gay and lesbian media organization. A few years ago they started looking into expanding their operations with the social dating network for the gay community. The initial plan to build it from scratch was abandoned in favor of purchasing and building out an existing product.
A mobile application is a crucial part of a modern social networking product. Pink Triangle Press hired Factorial Complexity to perform the initial code review for the product they have found for a potential purchase. After a careful code review and a session of Q&A with the seller's development team Factorial Complexity experts have compiled a report document outlining the current state of things, problems, and risks associated with the deal from the development perspective.
Pink Triangle Press management has eventually greenlit the deal, hiring Factorial Complexity as the mobile development services provider for both native iOS and Android applications of Guy Spy. The dedicated team of mobile developers was eventually expanded with Automation QA Engineer. The automated QA test suite was developed and maintained.
The application was republished, initial maintenance was performed and the new features were being added. The proper Scrum process was established with the Product Owner on the Pink Triangle Press side.
Features
All in all GuySpy is a pretty basic dating application. The feature set is more geared towards people looking for a short term relations.
Exploring by Geolocation
Users can browse profiles in the geographical proximity. Paid subscription allows browsing anywhere on Earth. Is supports filtering by profile values like age, height, entnicity and others. Results can be displayed on the map.
Profile
User profile is the core of every social application. Users fill out their profiles and upload photos.
Friends, Favorites and Blocked Users
User can befreind each other, add to favorites or block undesirable contacts. Paid subscriptions allows to see more of others activity with regards to the user's profile.
Chat
The application supports direct messaging between users. The dedicated XMPP server is used for chatting.
The main objective of the product was to create a sustainable monetization model. Pink Triangle Press picked a freemium model, where users will be granted access to new features on a paid subscription basis. The mobile development team assisted the marketing team with technical expertize in in-app purchases and subscriptions.
Factorial Complexity gained a great experience building mobile application for social networking and maintaining applications with hundreds thousand of active users. Factorial Complexity provided the expertise and helped to roll out a working product monetization solution.
