MeetMe is a livestream lobby with a dating app bolted on.

The home tab is a grid of live broadcasts. Tap one and you're in someone's room: a vertical video feed, a chat column, a tray of paid gifts that animate over the host's face. Tipping is the entire economy — coins bought with real money, converted into virtual diamonds the host can cash out. The Meet Group runs the same mechanics on its other properties (Tagged, Skout, LOVOO, Growlr), so anyone who has used one will recognise the layout immediately.

Around the live floor is a more familiar social loop. There's a Match tab with swipeable profiles, a Meet tab that surfaces nearby users, a feed of photo posts, and direct messaging that gates strangers behind a credit cost or a paid tier. Filters cover age, distance, and gender; verified-photo badges exist but are not mandatory. Free accounts get most of the surface area, ad-supported. MeetMe+ subscriptions remove ads, raise message limits, and unlock who-liked-you.

The app has been on the App Store since 2010 and the most recent update landed in April 2026, which tells you what kind of product this is — long-lived, frequently patched, never reinvented.

What MeetMe gets right is honesty about the loop. The home screen is livestreams; the home screen is also the business. There's no pretence that this is primarily a dating app or primarily a social network — it's a live-tipping floor with social discovery wrapped around the edges, and the UI doesn't try to hide the gift economy behind euphemisms.

Performance on a current iPhone is fine. Streams start quickly, chat keeps up, and the moderation tools available to a host — block, mute, kick — sit one tap deep instead of buried in a menu.

The harder thing to ignore is The Meet Group's safety record. Across its portfolio, the company has spent years responding to reporting and regulatory scrutiny about minors appearing in livestreams, sexual content slipping past automated moderation, and predatory adult behaviour aimed at younger users. MeetMe is rated 17+ on the App Store and asks for a date of birth at signup, but date-of-birth gating is a paper wall and the platform's history shows it. If you have a teenager with an iPhone, this is an app you want to know is installed.

Beyond the safety frame, the in-app economy is steep. Meaningful visibility on a stream — being noticed by the host, being pinned in chat — runs through paid gifts, and the conversion from dollars to coins to diamonds is opaque enough that the per-interaction cost is hard to feel until the receipt arrives. Free messaging is throttled, who-liked-you is paywalled, and the Match tab has the same diminishing-returns shape every freemium dating product converges on.

MeetMe is for adults who already know what a livestream-tipping app is and want one with a deeper pool than a brand-new entrant can offer. It is not a dating app in any serious sense, and it is not a place to send an under-18 user. If the live-tipping format is the appeal, Bigo Live and YouNow built the same loop with more international reach; if the goal is actually meeting someone, almost any dedicated dating app will get you further per dollar spent.