Apps Promising to Help You Make New Friends

As people seek deeper relationships, a multitude of new applications are coming into play to help solve the problem of feeling lonely in our modern lives by providing methods for making friends.

Why Friendship Apps Are Rising

Making friends as an adult has become harder due to busy schedules and digital lifestyles. As a result, friendship-focused apps are gaining popularity. In fact, many such apps have attracted millions of users and continue to grow rapidly.

Several friendship-focused applications have become widely recognized and adopted by the public:

• Bumble BFF
  A dedicated mode for finding friends instead of dates. It uses swiping and shared interests to match people.
• Meetup
  Focuses on group activities and events. Users can join communities based on hobbies and attend meetups in real life.
• Timeleft
  Organizes dinners with strangers matched by personality and interests, creating structured social experiences.
• Yubo
  A Gen Z-focused platform that uses live streaming and group chats to build friendships at scale.
• 222
  Offers curated in-person experiences designed to help people connect more naturally.

Different Ways to Join Friends

Different apps work in different ways. One type of app matches people up one-on-one, while other types of apps focus more on social group-type matching.

More recently, there are several newer apps that have been utilizing AI-based recommendations to help users better find (and create) an opportunity for an online match to turn into an in-person or real-life friendship.

Do these different types of apps work?

There is a mixed bag regarding the success of each app, with some users successfully forming and maintaining long-lasting, meaningful friendships, while other users fail to have any similar experiences after only communicating via the app.

Generally speaking, users who participate in more structured types of interactions with other users through an app are likely to have better results than users who have non-structured ways of interacting.

The Greater Shift

This trend reflects a major change occurring in the social world with respect to how we are forming friendships. People are starting to be more intentional about making friends, similar to how one would be when looking to find a date.

In a world where a digital connection occurs in place of a real-world connection, these different types of apps want to give you the opportunity to develop and grow a real-life (and hopefully meaningful) friendship, one match at a time.fl;d