I’m so exhausted by Grindr in India. I’m building a safer alternative for us, and I need your brutal honesty.

Hey everyone,

I’m a gay guy living here in India, and I’m just completely burnt out on the current dating app scene. Between the obvious bots, the blank profiles demanding face pics immediately, and the constant underlying anxiety of "is this guy a scammer or a honeytrap?", using Grindr feels more like navigating a minefield than actually trying to meet guys.

Just a few weeks ago, I had an encounter that really spooked me—a guy was super pushy about moving to WhatsApp immediately, and when I refused, he got weirdly aggressive and I realized how easy it would be for someone to screenshot my profile and out me. The extortion stories in the news lately are terrifying.

I work in tech/app development, and I realized that the big Western apps (Grindr, Tinder, etc.) do not care about the specific, severe safety risks we face in India. They just want our ad revenue.

So, I’ve decided to stop complaining and actually build something for our community.

I'm working on a new app that is essentially a hybrid between a safe, anonymous community forum (kind of like this subreddit) and a dating app. But the core focus is paranoid-level safety.

Before I write any more code, I want to know if I'm actually building something you all would use. Here is what we are planning:

1. Zero Screenshots: Android will physically block screenshots. On iOS, we will use capture-detection to instantly hide photos.
2. Text-First Community: A feed where you can just talk, vent, and make friends without the pressure of a meat-market photo grid.
3. The "Trust Grid": A local dating grid, but it's locked. You can only access it and message people locally after you've proven you are a real human (via a private liveness check) and haven't acted like a creep in the community forums.
4. Watermarked Chats: If you send a disappearing photo, it will have a faint, invisible watermark of the viewer's ID. If they use a second phone to take a picture of the screen and leak it, we can trace it and permanently ban their device hardware.

I don't want to build in an echo chamber.

What is your absolute biggest fear or frustration with the current apps? What would it take for you to actually switch over to a new platform?

Tear my idea apart, be brutally honest. What do you guys actually need?