Dating portal development: better inclusion and wider market reach

In the context of dating portal development, we made the following changes:

Implemented essential modifications to ensure platform compliance with DSA standards. This encompassed the integration of a robust content moderation system, establishment of a DSA-compliant reporting mechanism enabling users to specify violation types and relevant parameters, and automated PDF generation and submission to the customer support services for a manual review.

Revamped the application using contemporary design approaches and cutting-edge technologies, including Jetpack Compose for a sleek graphical user interface and the Clean Architecture pattern for separation of concerns. These enhancements made the app more user-friendly and easier to maintain and update in the future.

Our team added the following features to the Android app: ● Introduced a third gender option, labeled “diverse,” enabling individuals to specify their self-identified gender. Subsequently, our team undertook comprehensive platform revisions to accommodate this update. This included overhauling the registration form, refining platform settings, search criteria, and matching algorithms to integrate the new gender option. We also migrated some data fields to align with the inclusion of this third gender category. ● Implemented unit tests to automatically verify every new feature added to the app ● Introduced the functionality to distinguish between user photos captured in real time using the device's camera and those selected from the phone's gallery. Users who upload real-time photos are automatically awarded a verification badge. ● Enhanced some of the app’s features and moved them to the premium package. This resulted in more users choosing the premium subscription. Features such as profile filtering based on smoking preferences and the ability to view individuals who have expressed interest (i.e., “liked” you) have been particularly influential. ● Implemented a brand new feature enabling users to “like” parts of people’s profiles, such as their interests ● Adjusted the configuration of the mutual matching algorithm so that it considers the activities of other users instead of focusing solely on the searching user and their settings ● Adapted the app to accommodate individuals with specific accessibility needs. To assist users with visual impairments, our team introduced an Accessibility Service feature. This feature gives an audial description of design elements and fields as users point at them. Furthermore, it intelligently groups related elements like profile information together, enabling users to receive comprehensive audial feedback without the need to point at each individual field. ● Explored the feasibility of Spotify integration. The client tasked our team to experiment with integrating Spotify into the dating app to allow users to attach different songs/music to their profiles without having to log in to Spotify, and any profile visitor could preview these music segments without logging in as well. This was a challenge. Even though Spotify offered a software development kit (SDK) to integrate with mobile apps, it was only accessible after authorization. But our team discovered a workaround and investigated accessing Spotify's API using the backend server as an intermediate layer to establish the connection.

Our team is currently engaged in the ongoing migration and modernization of the client's platform. This is a lengthy and challenging process, as the custom framework is rather old and poorly documented. We are still working on changing the entire integration layer from the obsolete Java’s remote procedure call (RPC)-based protocol to REST-based integration. Some parts have already been successfully migrated. One example is user profile service, which includes information like age, height, education, etc. Another example is a photo service, which enables users to upload profile pictures.