The 7 Best Hookup Apps to help you get it on

Editor’s note: As people across the globe are encouraged to quarantine to prevent further spread of the coronavirus, we also believe it’s important to follow rules of social distancing when dating. Our advice below, while great when seeking someone to date in normal life, is best used when self-isolating is not recommended. In the interim, check out our solutions to dating during COVID-19 times here.

If your life is too busy to squeeze in the time-consuming intricacies of a longer-term relationship, or you’re just looking for a little low-stakes fun tonight, you need a quick, surefire way to try and find a quality fling. Dance clubs and dive bars may have worked in the ’90s, but now, even if you’re out, your phone is a much easier way to find someone to “Netflix and chill” with.

Hookup culture and casual dating changed dramatically in the past 20 years. It started with hookup sites like AdultFriendFinder and iHookup. Both of these sites, along with many others, operate on the philosophy that meeting someone special doesn’t need to be a big complicated thing. The “hookup revolution” completed when Hookup apps started to pop up like mushrooms after the rain, making your job finding casual sex even easier.

The odds are in your favor when you’re using an app that connects you with hundreds of local single women in your area. You’re able to chat up prospective partners at a volume that you wouldn’t be able to recreate if you were out at a bar trying to seal the deal (many have tried, many have failed). Another great thing with adult hookups sites is whether you prefer chatting extensively with your new crush first or a little fantasy in your play, there are diverse options to suit your every whim and desire. In fact, you can scope out potential hookup buddies without ever leaving your couch. That’s right — you don’t even have to buy anyone a drink or even put on pants. What a time to be alive, right?

It is true, that some hookup apps can feel a little dirty, and not in a good way. In fact, using an app to get lucky also has its downsides. Putting out feelers for a casual hookup to strangers you haven’t met yet can get dicey fairly quickly. Figuring out the right approach can take some time, too. You want to make your intentions known, but you need to do so in a way that doesn’t come off too strong or make her feel uncomfortable. You’ll need to exchange a few messages to see if you two are feeling each other, but you don’t want to become pen pals with someone you’re just trying to get it on with, either

Hookupexperts.com Editor’s Choice List of the 5 Top-Rated Dating Apps for Hooking Up:

1. Tinder –  Try it now!
2. Adult FriendFinder –  Try it now!
3. FriendFinder-X – Try it now!
4.Ashley Madison – Try it now!
5. Pure – Try it now!

Whether you’re looking for some casual sex or are just looking to send some naughty photos back and forth, here are our picks for the best hookup apps right now:

Tinder

Tinder has always been the mainstream, mindless swiping that we know and love.  Billed as an outlet for “friends, dates, relationships, and everything in-between”, Tinder is definitely more hookup–heavy than the other two apps.

It’s fast, easy, and if there’s one app that even the shyest, most skeptical people will be on, it’s Tinder. Even with a limited number of right swipes before you have to pay, the new Tinder update can provide a quick confidence boost or a last-minute date night date, depending on how you use it.

The Bottom Line: If you want to get laid, Tinder is the place to try.

Check out Tinder

Adult FriendFinder

When using AdultFriendFinder it’s incredibly difficult to walk away unsatisfied. It is one of the oldest, largest, and most-trusted hookup sites on the internet. Adult FriendFinder should be on everyone’s shortlist of hookup apps, first for its massive community of users and second for its ease of use.

Whether you’re looking for an in-person hookup or to blow off some steam via sexting or raunchy videos, AFF has everything that your dirty mind can think of and more. With 20-something million monthly users as well as live video options, chat rooms, groups for ultra specific kinks, and more, you can probably assume how wild this site can get. But there’s such a large and diverse group of potential matches, you’re very likely to find other like-minded people, which does wonders when all you want to do is connect with someone who’s on the same page as you.

The Bottom Line: AdultFriendFinder is like the booty call that’s always awake when you text them.

Check out AdultFriendFinder

FriendFinder-X

FriendFinder-X offers sexy singles the gratifying experience of meeting hot dates within a few clicks. This hookup site is designed to excite people’s imaginations and fill them with sexual energy. Whether you’re chatting privately or in a group forum, singles and swingers can be upfront about their sexual desires, fetishes, and fantasies.

The Bottom Line: It’s all about freeing people to enjoy sexual experiences.

Check out FriendFinder-X

Ashley Madison

Ashley Madison targets people who are unhappy in their marriage, which automatically gives it a demographic of older middle-class users. The result is easy pickings for hookups and casual sex if you are a guy, you’ll have much better odds here than you do on Tinder since there is more pent-up demand for sex among its members.

Ashley Madison is the ideal dating site for single and not-so-single folks who don’t want to get into anything serious. The married dating service appeals primarily to cheaters, swingers, mistresses, and polyamorous folks with a lot of love to give.

The Bottom Line: “Life is short. Have an affair”. So, whether you are single, looking to cheater, or a couple, this app will try to help you get the affair you want.

Check out Ashley Madison

Pure

Pure calls itself the hookup app for awesome people and is probs the most “no-strings-attached” option out there. You only have access to your matches for an hour before your convo disappears, so there’s a legit incentive to make things happen pretty frickin’ quick. If you two decide to meet up, you can drop a pin and select a meeting place.

This minimalistic and millennial app is fast, no-nonsense, and the blueprint of what a hookup app should be. There aren’t even any profiles — it’s just a feed of personal ads that let you get directly to the point of what you’re looking for. You can attach photos to your ads, but nudes are only allowed within chats, and Pure would like to remind you to only send nudes with consent.

The Bottom Line: PURE gives all the feels of a hookup-only site without the obnoxious naked parts everywhere with a “less talking, more touching” vibe.

Check out PURE

OkCupid

While OkCupid is also known as a “dating” app like Tinder, it’s def got a chaotic, horny vibe to it when you first log on. People on this app are down to meet up pretty quickly, and you’ll likely get lots of messages pretty fast, so you’ll have plenty of options to pick from.

The Bottom Line:  OkCupid genuinely wants dating to be a good experience, and their multi-faceted matchmaking and modern vibe help you find a hookup you can feel comfortable with.

Check out OkCupid

BeNaughty

When it comes to arranging hookups, BeNaughty is fast, easy, fun, and safe. This dating site has built a global network of sexy men and women who want to skip the small talk and cut right to the chase. If you’re interested in short-term romance, BeNaughty is the place to go and get your flirt on.

BeNaughty has both a wide audience and the right audience for finding a partner who’s down for an easy night of fun. It has a wide user base with more than 13 million users worldwide.

The Bottom Line: BeNaughty lets you indulge in your wildest fetishes with people who are on the same page.

Check out BeNaughty

Flirt.com

As you can learn from its name. Flirt.com is a flirty sex site, where singles can register an account on Flirt.com for free and start sending raunchy, silly, and flirty messages to anyone they desire.

It’s one of the largest and most active places to seek a sexual partner. Every month, Flirt members exchange more than 100 million messages on the dating platform, so you shouldn’t ever run out of people to chat you up at night.

The Bottom Line: Skip the awkward “dating” stage of a relationship and see if you can fast-forward straight to the sex.

Check out Flirt.com

Benefits of Using a Hookup App

We are busy people. It’s as simple as that really and there often aren’t enough hours in the day to fit everything in. That 5 minutes waiting in line, the queue for a bus, a break at work or in the gym, it’s those small moments in which we can take advantage and grab our phones.

Once you’ve signed up and got your profile sorted, it will be really easy to do just that. While you are waiting to see your Doctor, you could be searching up potential hookups and chatting to members. Hell, if you are brazen you could even be watching a few private videos with the sound off.

Hookup apps are time-saving, quick to access, you can take them wherever you go, the apps are streamlined to make them easier to use under those conditions and they are already part of your everyday life.

With the influx of technology and the way we model our lifestyles around it, companies would be stupid not to take advantage of this. All we want is the quick and easy option, we want it faster, more convenient and we want it to do as much as possible. Take any app on your phone that you use daily and say that’s not what you want from it?

What Features You Need to Consider When Picking Hookup Apps?

There’s really no one-size-fits-all hookup app, or even set of features. Your mileage will vary depending on many different factors, ranging from the signal strength in your area or your Wi-Fi speed to the level of familiarity with technology to your comfort with sending photos and videos of yourself to complete strangers.

However, there are some important features that are more popular and that you should know about as you get into the dating app market. In this section, we’ll detail what those are, how they bring value to you, and more.

Swipe:

We’ll start with swiping. It was pioneered by Tinder back in 2012 and has been copied by a number of other dating apps since that time. Swiping seems a bit callous at first glance, and it really is, since you’re choosing to like or dislike someone based strictly on their personal appearance.

However, that has connections to our natural behavior as human beings. You’re much more likely to be interested in someone you meet in real life if you feel a physical attraction to them initially. That allows time for you to get to know (and hopefully like) other things about them, such as their personality, their religious beliefs or lack thereof, their hobbies, and more.

Swiping is essentially saying yes or no to getting to know the other person better, and it helps to winnow down your list of options more quickly. However, emerging research shows that men are much more likely to swipe right (or to say yes) to just about any woman than a woman is to a man. This leads to a match disparity – men are much,

much less likely to find a match through these sorts of hookup apps than a woman is, simply because female users seem to be much pickier about who they choose.

Honest First Impression:

Too many of the hookup apps out there can give users a misleading first impression of their potential connections. This is largely due to the fact that these apps are text and photo-oriented. When you view someone’s profile, you will likely see a headshot, and then be able to read about their interests, hobbies, education, and more.

The problem here is that it can be very difficult to get an accurate first impression of someone based on nothing but a profile picture, some basic information, and maybe a few text chats. This means that you really won’t be able to get a good first impression of the other person until you meet face to face, and that could be weeks after initially connecting with them online. Many of the hookup apps out there are working to provide their users with a workaround for this.

Coffee Meets Bagel is one of the most obvious, as the app focuses on eight-second videos rather than traditional profiles. This can give users a much better idea of what the other person is like in real life than would be possible with a basic headshot and some biographic information. Other apps taking a similar stance include Hinge and Lively, both of which feature video profiles.

However, Coffee Meets Bagel takes things quite a bit farther. The app has a series of daily questions that users answer in the form of videos. Watching these videos not only gives insight into the user’s character, likes, and dislikes, but into the nuances of their personality.

Power Move:

The League has made waves as one of the hookup apps for those focusing on their careers, but it goes much deeper than that. Users must already have not just the League app, but also Facebook and LinkedIn.

On top of that, there’s a unique algorithm that powers the app, which ensures you only get five matches per day, two of which are mutual “hearted” likes. This creates a backlog of likes/hearts – if a person had 20 hearted likes already, and you hearted them, it would be over four days before they saw your like.

However, they have introduced another feature called “power move” that allows users to jump ahead of the line for a nominal fee. For a payment of $7, you can jump ahead of most everyone else and show up in the next batch of hearts, shown within just 24 hours. W

While that is an additional cost, it does allow people interested in one specific person to ensure they’re able to be front and center. Of course, there’s no guarantee that the object of your interest will return that interest, but there’s no harm in making sure you’re upfront, either.

Things to pay attention to:

As you can imagine, each of those apps differs greatly in terms of functionality and features. Tinder pioneered the “swipe” left or right, and many apps have followed suit. Fling.com focuses on videos that vanish after a day, etc. Here some common differences to have when examining a new app (Those are just a fraction of the differences in the hookup apps out there):

• Primary demographic age
• Gender focus
• Relationship type focus (niche)
• The primary type of user focus
• Level of information protection desired
• Length/type of relationship being sought
• How choosy/picky the user base might be
• The affluence of the targeted user base
• The sexuality of the targeted user base

Unwritten Rules of Using Dating Apps for Hookups?

When you’re using apps to find a local hookup, there are a few ground rules to keep in mind that will set you up for success in the long run.

1. Be upfront about what you’re looking for – Being direct with your expectations from the get-go means you’ll only be matching with women who are also looking for something casual with no strings attached, saving you the time it’d take to gauge whether or not your matches are here for the same reason as you are. Dating sites work much better if your match knows what you’re looking for, and you’re not being misleading.
2. Be flirtatious without being creepy – The key to initiating a hookup over a dating app is to exercise patience, it’s more important to make sure you don’t offend or put off anyone who isn’t interested in a hookup than it is to get your point across as boldly and as quickly as possible
3. Escalate the flirting in tandem with her interest – Try to get flirtatious and see how she responds. As long as your would-be hookup partner is matching your flirtatiousness beat for beat without appearing put off or weirded out, you’re not doing anything wrong. You can gradually escalate the nature of your flirting until you’ve advanced to sexual innuendo. At that point, if she still seems interested, you’ve got a green light of sorts to attempt to initiate a hookup.

Mobile-friendly sites

Unfortunately, some hookup sites don’t yet offer an app or they do but they have been taken off some market places under the belief they are too sexually explicit. Sounds like fun!

If your favorite hookup site doesn’t have an accompanying hookup app, it might have a mobile-friendly version of the site or if you are using a tablet, you might be able to use the regular website.

Take affairalert.com for example, there currently aren’t offering an app or if they do, it’s not in many markets but what they do offer is a mobile-friendly version of the site on mobile.affairalert.com. In most cases, it’s just putting them. in front of the web address but sometimes there are variations, just like there are in the app names.

You might be thinking ‘surely if I was going to use the mobile site, I might as well just use the normal website?’ Well, yes but bear in mind, not all webpages display properly on devices with a lower screen size capability.

The page might not load properly or become distorted in some way. In our experience, it is always better to use the mobile version if there’s one available as it will cause you less stress in the long run. Mobile versions will be built with a mobile device in mind and will behave to suit the characteristics of the device e.g. smaller screens, slower processors, touch-responsive, and just generally needing a higher efficiency.

FAQs

Are Dating Apps Just for Hooking Up?

Amusingly, there seem to be two contradictory misconceptions about dating apps: some people think they’re only for people looking for hookups, while others think they’re only for people looking for relationships. How did this idea take hold?

Well, some apps are deliberately vague about their purpose, trying to be all things for all people. Tinder, one of the most popular dating apps, is a great example: some people swipe for short-term fun, while others use it to look for love. To solve that problem, some apps have decided to specialize, so, for example, Bumble is known as a female-friendly relationship app, while other apps are more deliberately targeted towards short-term flings.

Of course, you’ll want to be using the right dating app to get the job done. Luckily, you’re looking for a casual encounter at a time when new apps and features are constantly evolving to help you find exactly what it is you’re looking for. Not sure which apps to start with?

We’ve put together a list of some of the best dating apps for hooking up, as well as our advice on how to use them to your advantage to get lucky tonight.