Google Play / dating / PLENTY OF FISH : DATING APP
REVIEW
Plenty of Fish is the dating app that refuses to disappear.
Older than Tinder, owned by the same company, and still pulling enough free-tier traffic that Match Group keeps the lights on. The 3.7-star average tells you most of what you need to know.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Plenty of Fish : Dating App
PLENTYOFFISH MEDIA ULC
OUR SCORE
5.4
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 3.7
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
Plenty of Fish is the dating app most people forgot was still there. It launched in 2003 as a free web product out of Vancouver, hit the Play Store in late 2010, and was acquired by Match Group in 2015 for $575 million — bringing it into the same portfolio as Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and Match.com. Fifteen years later, POF is still on the store, still updating, and still ranked well enough on free-dating-app searches that the 354,000 Play Store reviews keep accumulating.
The 3.66 rating is the headline. For comparison, Hinge sits north of 4.0, Bumble hovers in the high 3s but with a different user complaint profile, and Tinder draws a similarly mixed score but with a much larger denominator. POF’s number reflects a specific, durable user grievance — that the platform has too many fake, dormant, or scammer profiles, and that the paid tier is structured to extract value from users before delivering it. Match Group has not resolved this complaint in a decade of ownership.
What POF still does well is the thing it was designed to do in 2003: let people who don’t fit the swipe-only template find each other through longer profiles, free messaging, and granular search. That’s a real audience, and the app’s continued existence inside the Match Group portfolio suggests the company has calculated — correctly — that this audience is worth keeping separate from Tinder and Hinge rather than migrating onto them. The result is a product that is honest about what it is: a 2010s dating app, updated reluctantly, free enough to use, paid enough to monetize.
Plenty of Fish survives on inertia. Its users stay because they have already paid in time, and its rating reflects what they think of that bargain.
FEATURES
Plenty of Fish — POF to anyone who has used it — is a dating app owned by Match Group, the same parent company that owns Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid, and Match.com. Match Group acquired POF in 2015 from its Vancouver-based founder; the app has been on Android since December 2010, which makes it one of the oldest continuously operating mainstream dating products on the Play Store.
The product is a hybrid of the swipe-based discovery format popularized by Tinder and the longer-form profile / questionnaire format that POF was built around in its mid-2000s web origins. Users can swipe through nearby profiles, send free messages without matching first (a deliberate differentiator from Tinder), browse a "Meet Me" yes/no grid, and search by criteria that Tinder doesn't expose. Profiles can include longer text answers, intent flags ("looking for"), height, smoking / drinking habits, and a chemistry-style questionnaire that the app uses for its matching algorithm.
The app is free with ads and offers in-app purchases. The paid tier — historically branded "Upgrade" or "Premium" depending on the cohort — unlocks features like seeing who liked your profile, message-priority placement, and ad removal. Match Group also sells consumable boosts and tokens for one-off visibility bumps. The 354,000-review Play Store rating sits at 3.66, materially below Hinge and well below Bumble.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
Free messaging without a mutual match is the genuine product distinction. On Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble you have to be matched (or pay) to message; on POF, you can write to anyone, and they can write back. That is either the app's best feature or its worst, depending on which side of the inbox you're on, but it is the structural reason POF still has a user base — people who didn't get traction on the swipe-only apps come here for the lower friction.
Search filters are more granular than the algorithm-first competition. POF lets you filter by criteria — body type, occupation, smoking, kids, intent — in ways Hinge and Tinder no longer expose. For users who know what they want and prefer to look rather than be served, this is real value.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The 3.66 rating is not noise. Recent Play Store reviews are dominated by complaints about fake profiles, bot messages, dormant accounts that the app still surfaces as active, and account bans that arrive without explanation and resist appeal. These complaints are not new — they trail POF across years and platforms — and the perception that the user base contains a high proportion of inactive or fake profiles is, in 2026, the app's largest reputational problem. Match Group has rolled out photo verification across its portfolio, but on POF the badge remains optional rather than required, and unverified profiles still appear prominently in the feed.
The paid tier is murky. Pricing varies by cohort, geography, and how long Match Group's marketing has been A/B-testing the user, and the "Upgrade" funnel pushes hard inside the free experience — banner placements, modal interrupts, and visibility throttles on free messages that nudge users toward paying. The free experience is technically usable but architected to feel insufficient.
The Android client also lags behind Hinge and Tinder on basic UX polish. Photo upload occasionally fails silently, the chat view leaks notifications after you've read messages, and the "Meet Me" cards re-shuffle in ways that make it easy to lose track of profiles you've already considered.
CONCLUSION
Plenty of Fish is a Match Group product that survives because the swipe-only apps haven't worked for everyone — the lower-friction messaging and the more granular search bring back users who churned out of Tinder or Bumble. If you're in that group, it's worth a try, and the free tier is genuinely usable. If you're not, the rating reflects the experience honestly: dated UX, persistent fake-profile complaints, and a paid funnel that works harder than the matching does. Try Hinge first.