‘HER,’ a dating app for lesbian, bisexual and queer women; now available in Boston

Look out lesbians of Beantown, a new dating app made by women for women, is coming your way.

HER, the lesbian dating app formerly known as Dattch, will officially launched for iPhone on Friday.

“We’ve had a really high number of requests from Boston, and I think it’s in part due to the big collegiate system” HER founder and CEO, Robyn Exton told Metro. “It’s got quite a vocal community of people who have been emailing us and Facebooking us saying “C’mon you launched in Phoenix two weeks ago, how could you go there before us?”

Why did Phoenix get the app before Boston? Exton, who described Phoenix as having a ‘pretty decent” gay scene (with two whole lesbian bars!), said it was a matter of timing and Phoenix being closer to HER’s headquarters in San Francisco.

There are many things make HER a unique dating app, the primary being that it’s an app for women who date women made and run by women. The second thing that sets HER apart is its shift from being an app just for dating to one that resembles a social community.

“There was a really high, about 30% of users, who were in a relationship but still using the product,” Exton said. “Users would put on their profiles ‘I’m in a relationship, but just looking to meet people in the area.’ We thought that was really interesting because it hadn’t been built for that purpose at all. It had really been built just for dating reasons, but it just shows the much greater need within the community for a way for women to meet each other.”

Exton described the HER user experience as being one specifically tailored for a female audience, and mentioned that the same methodology of apps like Grindr just didn’t work with women.

“When you just have a picture of someone’s face you don’t really have a huge amount to talk about at that time, nothing is a really good conversation opener.” Exton explained. “We restructured profiles to be better suited for women. It’s like a Pinterest board that has Instagram content running through it. So you get to see who someone is in a snapshot really easily.”

The community aspect of HER is highly evident in the app, which prominently features a stream of local queer, lesbian and LGBT events that are in proximity to the user. In addition to events Exton discussed how the app will also stream LBT, Feminist and community based content tailored specifically for queer women.

Android users will have to wait till later in the summer for the app to reach their devices.