Badoo Review: Everything about it and how to get laid here

Badoo is very similar to another very popular and widely-known dating app called Tinder. And if you know anything about Tinder (which you may, since it’s the first hookup app most people install when they want to find a partner in the vicinity), you know also that this comparison is probably not flattering.

Badoo has been around for a longer time than Tinder, and it still has tons of issues that even the developers of rivaling Tinder didn’t come to cure. But it still remains one of the biggest apps not only in this area but in the entire Google Market.

With that in mind, you need to know how to use Badoo in order to get laid with it. And it’s not actually the simplest task, with all the sharp edges the developers failed to smoothen over the years.

Just like with Tinder, you may start looking for the ladies right away, albeit you need to overcome a few surprises first.

How Badoo works

Like with other apps, Badoo’s principle of operation can be described with two words: geolocation and swiping. It goes like that:

1. You allow an app to get the information on where you are at any given moment;
2. You put your city in so that people could see where you are;
3. You search through the matches of people in your general vicinity the app gave you

However, this principle doesn’t seem to work when you swipe manually. The left-most section of the app can give you a number of ladies with the amount of kilometer they are away from you in the increasing order. The swiping, on the other hand, works differently.

Swiping

The way you swipe people here is pretty classic as of today. You get profiles coming up with all the information the people behind them put on display alongside the photos. If you like the person, you swipe to the right, giving her a ‘like’. If you don’t, you swipe to the left, giving her nothing.

If you liked a woman, she’ll get notified that someone gave her a heart. If she’s bought a premium status, she’ll see who you are and the conversation between you two may commence. If not, then you’ll just have to wait until she buys one, there’s no other way.

If you didn’t like a woman, there will be no consequences and you probably won’t ever see her face again (unless you had bought a premium status, of course).

Extortion

The fact that you need to pay up in order to see who liked you is in itself pretty frustrating, especially since you probably need this app to find the women abroad during the trip or vacation. And if you visit somewhere outside the ‘first world’, you may find that not many people will want to part with their money just to get laid (probably).

Of course, there are different cultures and everything depends on so many factors, but the fact remains — there are not as many Badoo (or Tinder, for that matter) users in Africa and most of Asia.

And that is because of the simple choice many other hookup apps offer you — you either pay up or give up. As mentioned, you can’t see who liked you unless you but a premium status (‘Badoo Premium’) at least for a month.

What can you do with this status?

For a sizeable fee, you get to see who gave you like or responded with one to yours, rewind to the girl you said no to, become invisible for a time being, et cetera. The point is, there are virtually no important features in this app for free. 

You can return to the wrongly rejected match, see who gave you a like, become invisible to everyone for a little while, and a bit more. Some of it is buyable convenience, but the most important parts are essential, it’s very hard to start a conversation with anyone without buying the ‘premium’ first.

Of course, you can get yourself a partner for free, but you’ll need to do a lot of wiggling to do it. In the end, only paying will make you sure of outcome and make your search smooth and fast.

And this is not the least of Badoo’s problems, there are other disadvantages.

The matches aren’t always close

If you want to come to a certain country and hope to get laid with the local ladies there, you may be bitterly disappointed with Badoo is your app of choice. Badoo doesn’t always show you the people closest to you while you swipe, nor can you see how far away they are currently.

While swiping, you can see the cities these ladies live in, but you can’t see how close or distant they are to you in kilometers. You can do it in the special matches on the left-most section, but not in the swiping menu. And it may be pretty frustrating at times.

Setting the filters

Good news is, you can set your preferences for the matches you want to encounter while swiping. For that, click on the slider icon in the top right corner. The two most important parameters — distance and age — are at the top. As in other dating platforms, the age of your preferred matches is set accordingly to your own age, but the distance is up to you to designate.

The maximum distance can be whatever you want between 0 and 160 kilometers, but if you try to slide it further than 160, you’ll just set it to the ‘entire country’. Evidently, you can’t look for the women, say, 200 km away from you without also driving the entire country into it.

Other filters

Other good news, you can set extensive preferences for your matches, including height, constitution, kids, smoking, and drinking (all with preset statuses, so everything is pretty clear). And not least of all that is language. You can choose several languages to let people know you speak them. It is extremely useful if your goal is to use this app in your travels. 

You can just set this filter to ‘English’ and see who speaks it in your vicinity, easy as that. And if you aren’t an English speaker, you can even set your original language and see if there’s anyone around you to sustain a conversation in your native tongue.

Interests

It may come as a very basic thing to implement into your communication app, but not every one of them has an area where you could put these. Badoo is not of them, thankfully. There are an almost indefinite amount of interests and hobbies you can put in your profile for display.

They all come as hashtags, which is very helpful, because standardized parameters are very important if you’re trying to find like-minded people by what they wrote about themselves. 

Say you want to find some pretty lady who likes history, sports, and reading. Well, you can just put them into the search bar in your ‘filters’ menu. Not to worry, the app will show you the most popular variants. If there are people who bothered enough to designate their interests and hobbies, you’ll find them. 

What’s even more useful is that you can set what hashtags come first in your profile, implying which of your hobbies and interests define you more than others. Pretty convenient, considering that many other dating apps offer you no more than just basic descriptions of what a person likes. 

Other info about yourself

When you go through a person’s profile, it doesn’t look like a neat list of the photos, interests, parameters, et cetera. It’s designed differently: the profile is essentially a very long card you need to swipe down. This ‘card’ is an alternating flow of photos and brief information about the personality in the shape of a question and an answer. 

For instance: we won’t get along if you’re…

daft

Somewhere in between, there will be a whole chapter dedicated to the interests, and all the parameters she chose to describe herself (namely: height, body constitution, etc) will be put on one of the top photos. 

It may sound like a wild mess, but, in reality, it looks neat. The developers truly put an effort into making an app at least designed very well.

A conversation

You obviously can’t start a conversation unless you and your interlocutor have exchanges ‘sympathies’, but even then you won’t see who reciprocated you, because everyone who gives you a like is blurred out until you buy a premium status. And a conversation itself is the only way to actually arrange a date. So, you need to buy a premium.

The messenger part of Badoo is alright-made, there’s pretty much nothing to complain about or to commend. Then, whether the date will or will not be is up to you, it’s you who will do the talking, and if she likes you — you’ll get your date. The problems, anyhow, can be on her side also.

The users of Badoo

You may found that it’s not exactly easy to sustain a conversation with people in this app, especially if a girl you’ve found is ‘very popular’ (it means many people liked her and that she has a lot of conversations).

It means that a woman you’re actively trying to hit on may not answer your messages very quickly, and even then she’ll do it pretty lazily. It happens even if you’re just one of the few who texts her regularly.

The way to avoid such issues is simple. You need to do the three following things:

1. Put a lot of photos, interests, and info in your profile, and make it look neat. It’ll give away that you actually want to be serious you don’t just text people to waste their time;
2. Find the people according to their interests. If there is some niche thing you both very much enjoy, it’ll be a very good jump-point for a conversation. Other, less integral things, like movies, may not work as great;
3. Don’t start a conversation with any sort of ‘creative’ hookup or with the boring introductions. Make it creative but not as a joke

But honestly, if a girl doesn’t even try to sustain a conversation, then there’s no point continuing it, especially if it was her that found you. It really happens – they give you a heart, start a conversation with you and then answer once every 30 minutes – just back away from this conversation if it’s this disrespectful.

The best way to get laid with Badoo

There are a couple of methods you can take up to arrange yourself a nice date. However, they aren’t that obvious until after you’ve used them. See, the best way to find someone with not too much effort (if you have to put effort into it, you’re better off hookup people up offline) is to check regularly if there are new people near you (go to the left menu again).

Badoo is a very populated app, so even in the small cities, there are bound to be a few dozen people for you to pick from. But don’t do it too rashly. If you aren’t content with the selection you’ve got, then wait a few days and visit the page again. The newly-created profiles and those you couldn’t see before can appear.

Alternatively, you can also just swipe through your matches until you find the perfect one. Just be aware that every single one you give a heart to will know about it (if she has a premium). You don’t just tell yourself you like them, you tell it to them.

If you want a list of people you’ll pick from before finally settling on one, then it’s alright, otherwise you may get a lot of unwanted relationships. These relationships are real, you’ll have to stop or develop them. Giving a like to a person is a bit rude, especially if they can see who you are and return a favor.

Unseen profiles

That’s right – the profiles may turn invisible for some time. It happens for a variety of reasons — the charge on the phone may wear off, making geolocation not function properly, or the user may plainly set themselves to be invisible (it’s an option for those who pay).

Besides charge wearing off, there are actually tons of reasons why signal could die, like the bad connection, glitch, or just person turning geolocation off for some time (which makes you pretty much invisible without paying, since you can’t use the app). Start texting, when you’ve seen that one of these profiles is to your liking.

Of course, you can’t spend too much time waiting for more users to show up, that’s why you needn’t wait more than a few days. 

Other features

Notifications

If you can’t find anyone, Badoo will soon start sending you notifications about possible matches in your area. Not only that, but there is also a feature that continuously brings up people closest to you geographically. The notification occasionally pops up to praise you for meeting another user out of the Net. 

It’s ridiculous since it starts bringing people up on the first day even though you might not even get out of your house that day, much less see someone from Badoo. It’s really unclear if geolocation is broken that way or if the developers like to remind you that there are women very close to you on purpose.

Anyhow, if you don’t want to get possible matches every other hour, you better turn off the notifications for this app. But there’s really no sense in doing it for you if what you look for is the quickest way to get laid in some foreign place.

Verification

There’s actually a fair way to make your way to the top of the list without pay-off the developers. All you need to do is verify your account in two ways. 

First, you need to confirm your identity by receiving an email on the address that you’ve put in while signing-up. Just click on the link in the email, it’s a standard procedure that will give you something like a certificate of approval.

Then, you also need to confirm that you are a real living person by making a photo of yourself in a pose you’re shown. The picture won’t be used for anything, don’t you worry about it.

After everything is done, you may or may not get a verification that looks like a white tick in a blue circle. When someone sees that, they will know that you are a real deal and not a bot.

Setting your profile up

It’s not the only way, of course, to let people know that you’re serious about getting a relationship and that you don’t have much to hide. Back in a day, dating websites were notorious for housing loads of people with fake or photoshoped images of themselves.

Well, it doesn’t work now, nor can you avoid posting your photos. You can only put your own pictures in a profile (or, well, at least a person’s photos, but you’ll get banned if they know it’s not you). Additionally, the more pictures you put in your profile, the more likely you are to appear in people’s recommendations.

Moreover, the Badoo community is pretty huge, obviously. So, there’s a lot of competition. What it means for you is that you need to publish as many good photos of yourself as possible to draw attention and interest.

The private information

As you may recall, while searching for the best matches, you may try looking at their interests and parameters (and maybe purposefully filtering them in). It actually applies to you as well, if not for those who may be looking for you, then for those whom you’ve given your sympathy already.

There is a usual bunch — height, weight, habits, and so on. You might gloss over one very important bit of information, your intentions. You are to choose them right after creating your account and letting people know them is really significant. 

If you are looking for someone to simply talk to (it’s an option), then you’ll attract people with the same goal, since these intentions are what people look at after they are initially interested in you. 

What your real intentions are is up to you to decide, but don’t overlook this bit of information, it’s extremely important. They don’t install Badoo for the same purposes, some think that it’s a pretty good conversation app, for others, it’s just a hookup tool. If you look to get laid soon, then point it out right away, though it’s up to you to formulate what exactly it means for you.

Pros and Cons

In the end, it’s time for a classic pros&cons weighing. Badoo is a pretty comfortable app if you decide to pay for its main features. When you’ve paid for them, you can actually begin enjoying interacting with users. Here are the advantages of using it:

+ Badoo allows you to see if people are really serious about finding a partner and if they are real people;

+ Badoo lets you see people’s intentions, which is nothing but essential;

+ You get to look for people with shared interests, if not for dating then simply for talking to like-minded men and women;

+ Neat design that enables you to put a lot of information into your profile without making it cluttered and overwhelming;

+ Big community

And there are also very nasty disadvantages, like:

– Having to pay the app to be able to use the search and talking functions;

– Geolocation doesn’t work too well

That’s pretty much it, there are obviously more upsides than downsides, but the disadvantages are just too frustrating. Most of the pros are intended to make your experience comfortable and effortless, but the disadvantages not so much lessen your comfort as take your ability to use the app at all.

It’s not exactly a fair bargain. The cons, however, are pretty subjective — money may not be much of a matter to you, and geolocation shouldn’t be the most accurate. Still, you get to use the advantages only if you overcome the disadvantages, which isn’t how the apps are supposed to work.

In conclusion

All things considered, Badoo is pretty comfortable and fairly functional an app for hookups. It’s not as hard to get laid here if you do everything correctly and feel your profile with the necessary information. It’s even less of an effort if you actually pay attention to the new users in your area. Subjectively, it’s easier and much more comfortable than Tinder and alternative apps.

For the purposes of dating people from abroad, Badoo is close to perfect if you gloss over the fact that you still need to pay to use it for a month, even though your vacation won’t last that long. The community here is big and you get to see if a person you really like speaks English (which Tinder, for instance, can’t provide). Overall, it’s a great app with great possibilities.

But if what you need is more help on how to successfully hookup girls on Badoo or elsewhere, try another article on this blog. And for those who despise reading, there’s also a pretty helpful video about online dating: