Tinder’s going hard on facial biometrics. Used to be my go-to, but I don’t know if I can bring myself to cave for that.
Struggling to get Grindr to work on a degoogled phone. Getting repeated “verification failed” messages.
It’s really shitty, because the “just go meet people in person” really doesn’t work for gay people. For a lot of gays, if they can’t meet people online, they’re basically doomed to a life of loneliness.
What is everyone doing to tackle this problem?
Unsure where you live, but are there no local hangouts for the gay community?
Doesn’t matter where you live, nobody goes out anymore.
I don’t know if it work on graphene OS. But I did use 2 years ago Hinge and Bumble on a android device with no google account. I never provide my face biometrics. So maybe try Hinge and Bumble ?
I did not use my real name, but I had a low quality picture of me with big glasses, it turn out that it did not help my dating. I end up quitting this because it was a superficial and very ‘competitive’ system.
If you care a lot about privacy, I know there was one app/site that got ranked pretty favorably on Mozilla’s privacynotincluded.
Since they recently nuked the site, I can’t check to remind myself. Perhaps you can find something on thewaybackmachine
The best-documented example is Lex, a text-based app built for the queer, trans, and non-binary community. It was essentially the only dating app that got a positive grade from Mozilla’s independent “Privacy Not Included” review — Mozilla specifically praised that it collects minimal data, doesn’t share it for marketing purposes, and has a “crystal clear” privacy policy (Mozilla Foundation). A 2026 roundup referenced by Hidnn similarly describes Lex as having no behavioural tracking, no advertising SDK chain, and no location triangulation — though the trade-off is a smaller, US-skewed dating pool and text-based personal ads rather than photo swiping.
With firsthand experience using this app this year: do not use Lex.
Since Mozilla’s assessment it was acquired by a larger company that gutted the text-only angle and made it more generic - that is to say, a worse version of other existing dating apps.
It’s true that they really don’t ask for much data, which is why I used it at first, but the amount of users is tiny, the community is dead, the feature set is sparse, and it constantly tries to upsell you.
The only thing it seems people use this app for is hornyposting (and getting into fights) in the dedicated group channels.
For what it’s worth, they were very chill about the GDPR request I sent, so that’s nice, but it’s useless as a dating app.
I jumped ship to HER, which I had far more success on. I’m under no illusions that this was a big step down for my data privacy, but there does not seem to be a dating app with a meaningful community that respects privacy.
HER made it quite easy for me to delete all my data once I was done, which is a small upside.
It also worked on GrapheneOS, but only after I disabled my VPN.