Making a Polyamorous Dating App

Dating online while poly

More and more dating apps are opening up their settings to cater more to polyamorous people, but they’re still in the early stages. Enter #open, an app developed by Amanda Wilson and David Epstein to be a sex positive and polyamory positive platform for people to connect on.

Amanda and David wanted to prioritize communication on #open, so they designed their app to focus heavily on negotiation, consent, and boundaries. Users sign a code of conduct to ensure that they understand that consent and inclusion are important and need to be respected.

Data privacy

Additionally, one of the biggest concerns while creating #open was the idea of data privacy. Most other dating apps trade data with third parties or use third-party authentication, or something of the sort. It was important to Amanda and David that all of the data for #open was secure, so they made sure their privacy policy covered all bases.

“People want to be themselves. We just really wanted to build a platform that was for the users and always had their privacy and their security in mind from the very beginning.”

Amanda

#open’s biggest challenge

The biggest challenge when creating #open and continually developing and updating it is funding. Attracting investment is difficult for dating apps, especially when choosing not to share any data. Amanda and David have self-funded #open, and if they could advertise on Facebook or other large platforms, it would help with revenue. Reddit, and by turn, Facebook, denied their application by the logic that #open was placed in the category of mail order brides and that community sentiment was that content like that is unwanted. Being sex positive and relationship positive in a world where corporations are moralizing is difficult, and hypocritical in Facebook’s case, since millions of their users practice consensual non-monogamy.

To combat the hypocrisy, Amanda and David have started a petition to call Facebook out on their censorship. It can be viewed and signed on their website, www.hashtagopen.com, along with more information about #open and its creation.

Listen to the full episode to learn about Amanda and David’s full experience creating their app!