Find friends, not just dates
Making friends as an adult is harder than dating, and almost nobody builds for it. The apps that exist are dating apps with a friendship toggle bolted on, which is why the toggle never quite works.
On Tekero, friendship is not a mode. It is one of the things you can announce, on the same footing as everything else.
Why adult friendship is hard
The shift is measurable: in 2021, 12% of Americans reported having no close friends at all, up from 3% in 1990, and half said they had three or fewer (Survey Center on American Life). Across the EU, 13% of people report feeling lonely most or all of the time (EU Loneliness Survey, 2022). Friendships used to form from repeated unplanned contact — school, university, an office you actually went to. Remove the repetition and you remove the mechanism. Remote work, moving cities and the general disappearance of third places have quietly removed it for a lot of people.
What is left requires doing something that feels strangely exposed: telling a near-stranger that you would like to be friends. There is no socially standard way to say it, which is exactly the gap an announcement fills.
Why dating apps fail at friendship
Because the underlying ranking is still built for attraction. Switch a swipe app to friendship mode and you get the same photo-first feed with different labels, populated by people who mostly have not switched.
Intent is also invisible. A friendship request that arrives through a dating interface reads as ambiguous no matter how it is phrased — and ambiguity is precisely what makes people not reply.
How it works on Tekero
You post what you are looking for and it is visible before anyone talks to you: someone to run with on Sunday, a person to take the spare gig ticket, a group for a hike, a language exchange partner, someone new in the city who also does not know anyone yet.
Because the intention is explicit, nobody has to decode it. Mutual filters mean you are shown to people who announced something compatible, and Empathy Openers give the first message somewhere to start — which matters even more for friendship than for dating, since there is no attraction to carry an awkward opening.
Friendship Levels give the connection visible progression, so a friendship that is actually developing looks like it is developing rather than living in an undifferentiated chat list.
Together Mode: meeting people as a couple
Couples have a version of this problem that almost nothing addresses. Making friends as a pair — finding another couple for dinner, a group for a weekend, people to travel with — is socially awkward to arrange and impossible on a dating app without being misread.
Together Mode lets you link with your partner and appear as a pair, so the intention is unambiguous from the start. It works for friendship, plans and shared experiences.
Sources
Figures on this page come from the following research.