Could genuinely be a 5 star app if they listened to the people using it
Three stars, and I want to be clear that this is not a low score without reason. This app could very easily be a 5 star app. What holds it back is not the concept or the community. It is a handful of choices Taimi keeps making on my behalf. THE GOOD, BECAUSE THERE IS A LOT OF IT I have met some lovely people on Taimi. It is honestly one of my more successful options, even if it takes patience to get there. I use it pretty often, with my own safeguards around how I use it. But in simple terms of actually meeting people, it does work. Just not always the way it should. The filters, when they stick, are mostly workable. Fairly standard across the board with a few extras I appreciate. NOW THE PART I NEED THEM TO HEAR This is after almost a year of use, so none of it is a first impression. - There is no way to filter out polyamorous and ENM users who are looking for that specifically. I do not have the poly section filled out on my own profile because it is not what I am looking for. No hate at all to people who are, it is simply not my thing. You would think leaving that toggle off would mean I stop being shown people seeking it. It does not. Often I do not catch it until after a match, when I revisit the profile and realize I missed it. - The app overrides my age and location filters. Instantly. To be fair, it tells you it is doing this. But I am a 39 year old queer man and I am not trying to be shown 18 year olds 50 miles away. If the pool runs dry, just say that. Tinder does. Hinge does. Some of them go with a polite "adjust your filters to see more people," which is infinitely better than just deciding my filters are more for entertainment than actual filters. It reads as engagement for the sake of engagement, regardless of whether that engagement is legitimate. - The main result of this is app fatigue faster here than on other apps. I set my filters, the app overrides them minutes later, I set them again, rinse and repeat until I’m just over it. - The AI Assistant also appears to be enabled by default. It sends likes and messages on your behalf, and it is frequently wrong about who and what I would actually go for. I did not agree to a bot doing this. Now, to be fair I have since disabled this and haven’t seen any indication that it is still doing this. - Then there are the false message notifications. I contacted support about this and was told it is meant to happen. The notification is not there to tell you that you have a message. It is there to get you back on the app. Nothing quite like seeing that someone you liked messaged you, opening it up, and sitting there waiting for a message that does not exist. That is not the other user's fault. That is Taimi's. - Which brings me to ghosting. Every app has that. I put more of it on Taimi than on the users, because I know the app does things users did not directly consent to. BOTTOM LINE Taimi could easily be one of the best apps out there if not THE best. I cannot hand them that, because several of these choices read as dishonest and misleading. So I take interactions with a grain of salt and keep notifications off, because they have not earned being trusted. UPDATE after Taimi's response: I greatly appreciate the reply and the transparency about how the filters work. However, with that in mind, I have a few clarifications to my original review. My filters are ages 24 to 45 within 35 miles. That is not narrow. If the pool empties after one profile, that is a user density issue, which Taimi also names in their answer about the poly filter. Waiting a few hours does not resolve it. I wait, get roughly one or two people, and the filters override again. That loop is the fatigue I described, and waiting in some area may work but it doesn’t work in mine. I usually have to wait weeks or more to have a good stack to match on. The response from Taimi addresses distance but not age. Age is the part I would say I care about most. I am not looking to be shown 18 year olds as a 39 year old queer man. On the AI Assistant, if enough users are accidentally consenting through prompts like Curated batch that it is the standard explanation, the consent flow is the issue, not the users. Still three stars. Still hoping for five one day.