"The ad says you can chat for free": a 5-week-old dating app, and at least 18 identical siblings behind it

CatchLove is a swipe dating app that hit Google Play in late September. In its first 5 weeks it got 5,400 installs, and it squeezed into the social Top Free charts in the UK, Australia, and Canada. It isn't special on its own. It's the latest disguise of a template that buys installs to pull in male users, then pops a paywall after a few chats. Under that same template I found at least 18 accounts. The oldest has been running for three years, with 2M installs. What's worth studying is how the playbook shifts, not whether it can be copied.

One bad review

In 2026 Oct 17, a user named Michael Traynor left a one-star review on CatchLove's Google Play page:

the Ad says free to talk after a couple of messages then you have to pay for premium to continue talking so the ad lied

The ad says you can chat for free, and after a few messages you have to buy membership. "Advertising lies." The next day, another user, Kirk Rose, was blunter: "And yet another bot program... Nothing but cyber and porn pics that you get to pay for." One more said they couldn't even register an account.

These three are the only reviews with text among its 181 ratings (Google Play UK, 11-06). Nearly all the others are five stars with no words.

What it is and who made it

The store page says "Swipe, match, chat, and make friends": swipe the cards, and if you both like each other, you can chat. In-app purchases run from $4.99 to $99.99, in a single tier. It launched in Sep 28, and it had one update in Oct 22 with two words in the release notes: "fix bugs."

The developer is NovaCode Technology Limited, a Hong Kong company registered in November 2024, with its address in a Mong Kok office building that does bulk company registrations. The website banterre.com is a hollow company template page, and its body text still carries another company's name: "At AlphaCore Technology, our mission is…" The contact email is a personal Gmail. The same developer account also lists utility apps like a bookkeeper and a calculator that almost nobody installs. Warming up a developer account with utility apps before launching a dating app is a common pattern for these accounts (inferred).

The app has also been renamed. It first went out as "CatchLove - Chat," then became "CatchLove Dating: Meet Singles," stuffing the search terms "dating" and "singles" into the title.

How big it has gotten

The curve rises in discrete steps, not the way word of mouth spreads (inferred: paid acquisition).

On the charts, 11-06 it sat on the UK Social Top Free chart 114, Australia 138, and Canada 200, climbing steadily since late October, and briefly hit France in late October. The bar is very low: the #1 spot on the UK chart (113) is Joymeet, an older account on the same template, and the apps around it at 100–120 are small dating apps with a few thousand to tens of thousands of installs, with SUGO and Minichat, both at ten-million scale video chat, mixed in. Two or three thousand installs a week is enough to reach the top 200.

4.59 ratings, 173 reviews. From 10-29 to 11-06, the rating went from 100 to 173 while installs rose 2,169, and new ratings made up 3.4% of new installs. Normal apps usually land between 0.5% and 1%. Whether an in-app prompt drove this or it was botted can't be told from the outside.

It's not one app, it's a string of them

Break down the CatchLove privacy policy URL, and the path is <domain>/proto/privacy-policy. Searching Google Play for that path turns up at least 18 social and dating apps using the same one. Most list a developer named "XX Technology Limited", a few list a personal name, all use disposable domains plus Gmail. A few examples:

Their websites are selling other things: Joymeet's site says "cycling enthusiast community", Hive's says "reading and selfie social", and Sweety and Nearish are unfinished {company_name} templates with the footer "All photos are of models and used for illustrative purposes only" (homepages, 11-06). Whether this is one group running a row of shell brands or different clients of the same dating white-label backend, I can't tell. The developer emails include Chinese pinyin names, Arabic names, and Pakistani names.

The lifespan of a single account, using Sweety: July new installs 9.3k, August 11k, September 24k, October 17k, and the first 6 days of November only 2k (third-party estimate). Paid acquisition fades within two or three months, then they open the next one. After Lovent and Comee dropped off, CatchLove and Nearish filled in from 9 to October. The old accounts can run for one to three years and hold Top Grossing spots in the Netherlands, UK, Spain, and US.

Where the money comes from

The mechanism is the one the bad review describes: an ad promises "free chat", a male user installs, chats a few messages, gets a premium paywall, and then pays in-app purchases of $4.99 to $99.99. Whether the people on the other side are real has been alleged by users ("all bots"), an accusation I could not verify, but it matches the reputation of Joymeet, the same template, on Reddit (a thread titled "legit or scam?").

CatchLove itself has never hit a grossing chart, so its revenue isn't visible. Its sibling Sweety gives a reference point: third-party AppGazers estimates it at $10k–48k in Google Play revenue for October (estimate). A shell with over 60k installs making that in one month, plus older accounts sitting on grossing charts for years, suggests the "paid acquisition + paywall" math works.

Where the ads run is hard to see from outside. There's a Facebook page called "CatchLove-Abuse" with 1 followers; 11-01 posted a video, "try new dating app", credited to CatchLove, with 3,100 views. A page with 1 followers pulling three thousand views looks like paid promotion (inferred). Google and TikTok ad libraries show nothing for it. No one organically discusses it on TikTok or X, and there's no press coverage.

How many people are doing this

Almost nobody knows the name CatchLove. But the playbook behind it is an open secret in going-global circles: this template alone has at least 18 accounts rotating, and there's another group, UK-registered, with a Chengdu team, including Dash, Pullup, and Slip, running the same model with the same $99.99 in-app purchase ceiling. Above them sit Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, which have real user pools, and beside them sit video-chat apps like SUGO and Minichat that monetize through gifts and coins.

There's nothing product-wise that sets it apart. The pitch of "swipe, match, chat, make friends" is interchangeable word for word with the store pages of Sweety, Hive, and Nearish.

If it were you

D. Understand how the playbook works and stop there; don't build the next shell. It makes money through three things: a misleading "free chat" ad, (per users) fake profiles and bot chat, and constantly rotating accounts ahead of takedowns. Remove those three, and what's left is a dating app with no user pool, which can't cold-start. Keep them, and you're racing a group that already runs 18 accounts with a working backend, while carrying takedown and complaint risk.

Who it's for: teams already doing paid acquisition for overseas social, dating, or chat apps who want to see how low the bar is on the UK, Australia, and Canada social free charts, and how much a paying user can carry in acquisition cost.

Who it's not for: indie devs who want to build a dating product that lasts; anyone unwilling to touch fake profiles and misleading ads; anyone without paid acquisition experience who expects organic store traffic.

What you can take: the English-speaking social free chart needs only two or three thousand installs a week to reach the top 200, which makes it a cheap visibility slot for a new social app. After launch, rename the app to get keywords into the title, and ask for ratings right after users get value. These tactics also work for a legitimate social product.

How to acquire users (if you're building a legitimate social app): start with only the three small English-speaking markets of the UK, Australia, and Canada, push weekly installs to two or three thousand to earn a spot on the social free chart, and make sure ad promises match what the product delivers. That mismatch is why this set of shells has to rotate accounts every two or three months.

Deadline: none. This model has run for three years. It won't close because you arrive late, and it won't give you extra because you arrive early.

Where this estimate could be wrong: ① if CatchLove survives past six months, reaches 100k installs, and keeps updating, it shows a single account can run long-term like Joymeet, and each shell is worth more than estimated; ② if a dating app with the same acquisition-plus-paywall model but with real profiles reaches hundreds of thousands of installs on these charts, the legitimate version is viable and this rating should go up; ③ conversely, if Google Play starts mass-removing accounts using the same privacy-policy path, you don't even need to look into it.