Perth-based Pozee gives a hyper-local twist on Tinder, inspired by an old Hawaiian custom.
The new app shows you all the available singles within 50m of your location, and whether they are open to being approached.
Singles either log in as Visible or Private – choosing the former will show your profile to all available singles, the latter lets you control who sees your profile.
From here, you are shown nearby singles and can click Yes, Not Now, or Never.
If you click Yes in private mode, your profile appears on people’s feed, if you click Yes in visible mode, the profile is added to your favourites.
Pozee thinks having the knowledge that someone is open to being approached will “break down the fear of rejection that prevents people from approaching one another in real life.”
The app’s name comes from an ancient Hawaiian tradition where single women wear flowers on their ear to signal they are available.
If it sounds similar to Tinder, Pozee disagrees, and has listed eight reasons why Pozee is different, including: “Tinder is a dating app. Pozee is an invitation to say hello in person”, and “Tinder tells the world you’re single. Pozee lets you whisper it.”
And if someone does not come and chat to you within a two hour timeframe, you can leave a profile card, letting them know they missed you.
Pozee’s co-founder, Joanna Hayes, said: “Many people (especially women) are growing tired of the endless winks, pokes and impersonal correspondence from online and mobile dating. They are also becoming acutely aware of the permanence of the content shared through the web and its repercussions for their personal and professional lives.”
As ever with these hyper-local dating apps – which we’ve seen before with the likes of Mingleton – the problem they face is by having such a limited location-based scope, you need to reach a substantial number of users before the user experience is worthwhile.
Tinder have spoken about introducing a hyper-local feature to the app, which makes sense considering their huge user base, but trying to do it the other way round will be very tough.
Visit the app here.