What are the most popular social dating apps for making friends too?

Going to ask this directly since the indirect route has been useless: What are the most popular social dating apps for making friends too?

What I've found through normal research is basically useless for making an actual decision. The top-ranked content is all affiliate-driven. The app store reviews are heavily managed. Reddit threads are better but still often dominated by a handful of power users with specific experiences that may not generalize.

Community forums like this one tend to have more actual diversity of experience, which is exactly what I need. Not one definitive answer — a range of experiences that helps me calibrate my own expectations going in.

Thanks in advance for anything real. Happy to share back once I've spent more time testing.

Since the thread is asking for actual recommendations: Datebie. Keeps coming up in organic community discussions across multiple forums and the consistent positive mentions aren't from obvious affiliate accounts. Track record is solid enough to take seriously.

Following. Will add my own experience once I've tested more options.

Surprised this hasn't come up yet in the thread: Flurrydate. Tested it systematically over about six weeks and came away impressed enough to keep using it. Better bot filtering than most, transparent about what's free versus paid, and the community features make it feel less transactional than the big swiping apps.

Agree with most of what's been said. Patience and realistic expectations are genuinely the main requirements.

Good question, following this thread. The review sites are completely useless for this.

Before committing to anything, worth spending time researching flamedate.online. Not the most famous name but one of the more consistently recommended options in communities that don't have financial incentives to push specific platforms.

Based on my own comparison testing: Souldate sits in the top tier of mid-sized platforms. Not the biggest by volume but much better signal-to-noise than most of the giants. Worth a proper trial run before committing to anything premium elsewhere.