The Latest Feeld Update Is A Complete Shitshow

I guess testing is something that only dogs do, right?

If you don’t know, Feeld is an application for people who are into BDSM, couples looking for unicorns, or people with unusual desire. I use it because I’m into BDSM. This is the dating platform on which I’ve had the most success so far.

I’m using Feeld because it is the best one to answer my needs, but best one here does not mean what you think it might mean. Here, best one is equivalent to least shitty. I’ve had quite a few problems with it, ranging from poor location handling, to awful filtering capabilities, to flat out bugs.

Here’s an example. Location handling in the old app was godawful. What you got was a distance from your location, and that was it. Good luck guessing whether that person was 20 miles away from you but took about 30 minutes to get there because the travel was mostly on highways, or took one hour of driving on small roads. Yes, it does make a difference. You also had no clue whether someone was travelling away from their home base, or was located in your city. This was fixable by explicitly stating your position in your profile, but precious few people did this.

So last week, Feeld told its customers that it would go dark for 12 hours to make an upgrade that would be “totally worth it!” I’m paraphrasing here, but that was the gist of their corp speak. The upgrade took more than 24 hours, and the results are very subpar.

Let’s take the example of the location problem. Now I can see which city people are located in. Yay! Except that a lot of profiles don’t show any city. Instead, they show nothing at all, they show “Exploring”, or they show “Exploring [such and such location near to me.]” What the hell does this mean??? It seems that “Exploring” means that people are not at their home base, but I’m not sure about this. There’s also an option to show distance in miles in the app settings. I turned it on, but it does not seem to do anything.

Oh, another problem that existed previously was that people did not use the same terms in their list of Desires. These operated similarly to hashtags on Twitter, the fediverse, YouTube, etc. One of the issues is if someone put in “dominant” in their desires, did they express a desire to be a Dom, or to have a Dom, or perhaps both? It was very unclear. So Feeld standardized the list of terms we can use. However, their conversion was dodgy. I can see profiles that appear to have been converted where the person in the profile expresses that they are a sub, but their desires are, “Being dominant.” Yikes!

In addition to the above, the app loading is slower than it used to be, and it also hangs more often. Before the upgrade, I had to kill the app fairly often, after the upgrade, this frequency has increased. This is highly aggravating.

What’s going on here?

Nobody performed proper testing on the code. It is as simple as this. I did take Feeld to task in the past over this. I guess no lesson was learned. I used to be a software engineer. Testing was one of my tasks. I guess testing has gone out of fashion. The bottom line must be protected at all costs. If it means skipping testing, then so be it.

This upgrade is the work of amateurs. What a shame!