Gay Men are Very Early Tech Adopters and Prefer Android to iPhone

Vancouver has been on the forefront of the dating industry for years thanks to successes like Markus Frind’s industry disrupting dating site and Teligence’s domination of voice personals.

With the emergence of mobile apps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Vancouver is leading the way again. This time in the gay market and a local startup is taking on the market leading hook-up app Grindr.

Grindr, which first launched in 2009, calls itself “the largest and most popular all-male location-based social network.” It’s a simple app that uses your mobile device’s location-based services to show you where like-minded Grindr users are.

GuySpy is a free app that includes all the features that Grindr offers in their paid app. Paid premium features allow users to view and cruise more members, get push messages, and send images in HD. According to Stark Mobile’s Morris Chapdelaine, GuySpy also beats Grindr for traveling gay men on the move by allowing users to change their location and connect with others in advance of traveling.

But GuySpy isn’t just a hook-up app. They’ve got a content-rich website has become a community of its own with 400,000 visitors per month.

Techvibes chatted with Chapdelaine and learned a lot about the lucrative gay app market as well as the technical preferences of their unique demographic. According to Morris, gay men are very early tech adopters and the Android platform has now overtaken iPhone.

50,000 new users installed the GuySpy app last month with 55% of those users in North America.  The app is currently getting 2,000+ downloads per day and 20,000 users are interacting with the app daily.

In a world where it still isn’t always safe to be open about your sexuality—GuySpy has a lot of users in Arab and Africa countries—apps like GuySpy allow users to connect discreetly with like-minded people in their community. And that’s a good thing in today’s hyper-connected world.