Grindr: Not Just Guy Thing, an iPad Thing

Grindr is the most notable social networking mobile app that enables gay, bi, and curious men to find each other make connections. The geolocation app uses GPS and cellular locations to pinpoint the users’ locations and the location of other users in your area. You can see if and when users were online, along with their exact location (with maps), view photos and profiles, and if you want come out of…your comfort zone, chat and meet up.

Until now, Grindr has just been an iPhone app (there is beta for BlackBerry in the works). Now Grindr has released an iPad app to allows users to make use of all the functionality and real estate that the iPad has to offer.

Thanks to the iPad, images are larger and more detailed, thanks to the iPad’s 9-inch display, and user profiles have their own location on the screen instead of overlapping the user images like its little brother iPhone app. Using Grindr for iPad also syncs all of your activity with your Grindr iPhone app. So you won’t have to worry about losing any messages, and all of your favorite user profiles go with you no matter which device you use.

Yes, I did download the app to test the app’s functionality; and I must say that this is one clean app. Immediately upon opening the app, user’s images and tiled on the screen. The app uses GPS, so the closest users to you are displayed first. The name of the user along with an indicator in the lower-left side of the user’s image stating whether or not that user is online.

Tap on a user’s image and more detailed information comes up. You can see how far (in miles) the user is along with their age, height, weight, and ethnicity/nationality. Under the image, that you can double-tap to get an even larger view, is the user’s quick, one-sentence headline. Most are pretty witty and amusing (no surprise there). The options you have to interact with the person are chat – which takes the form of your typical bubbles, where userscan send private messages to each other. You can “favorite” the user so you can refer to them later whether they are online or not. Finally you can block a user to stop their profile from showing up during your initial search, and stop them from contacting you. The only feature I could see being a nice addition would be the ability to create groups to chat with multiple users at the same time.

The only problem I could find with the app is the fact that it doesn’t work in landscape for the iPad. Not sure if that goes the same for the iPhone app, but to REALLY utilize the iPad, a landscape orientation with either some added features and/or different screen layout is ideal.

The Grindr app is free, but if you want the ad-free version of Grindr, to lose the ad banner at the bottom of the screen, you can upgrade to Grindr X(tra) for only three bucks. Upgrading also offers added functionality like push notifications even when the app isn’t running, the ability to swipe through user profiles without going back to the main screen, and viewing an additional 100 extra users (200 total).

Overall the Grindr for iPad app does what it sets out to do very well. No clutter, no overabundance of features. Just a well laid out app that lets users find each other, chat, and make connections.

About the Author
Terrance Gaines is a husband, father and self-proclaimed Technology Evangelist who shares tech news, reviews, tips and tricks on his blog BrothaTech.com as well as other sites and in print media. You can also find him talking "all things tech" on Twitter @BrothaTech.
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