"Make New Friends" Is the New Dating App

If your kid had Tinder on their phone, you'd notice. You'd know exactly what it was and you'd have a conversation about it by dinner.

Now picture an app called Wink. Or Hoop. Or purp. The icon is bright and friendly. The store listing says "Make New Friends." It looks about as dangerous as a fidget spinner.

Underneath, it works like a dating app.

The same mechanics, friendlier packaging

Here's how most of these apps work. You make a profile with a photo and your age. You see a stream of other people's profiles. You swipe or tap on the ones you like. If they like you back, you match, and now you can talk.

That's the dating app formula. The only thing that's changed is the word on the box. "Dating" became "friends."

A few names worth knowing:

• Wink and Hoop are swipe-to-match friend finders. Both are built to hand the conversation off to Snapchat once you match.
• Wizz has been described as Tinder for teenagers. Same swipe, same Snapchat handoff.
• purp, LMK and Peeps are all "make new friends" apps that match kids with strangers by shared interests or in audio rooms.
• BeFriend goes a step further. Its stated purpose includes meeting people in real life.
• Boo matches on personality type. It calls itself "Dating. Friends. Chat." and lets the user pick which one they're there for.
• HMU used to be published under the name "FreakOn." It got a friendlier name. The permanent ID on the phone still carries the original.

Most of these apps rely on whatever age and identity the person typed in. There's no real check.

Why the Snapchat handoff matters

Several of these apps aren't really designed to hold a conversation. They're designed to make a match and then move it somewhere else, usually Snapchat, where messages disappear.

So the app you might spot on the phone is only the front door. The actual relationship, whatever it turns out to be, is happening in an app you already know about and probably already thought you understood.

That's worth sitting with. A kid can have a totally ordinary Snapchat friend list and still be talking to strangers they met through a swipe app, because the stranger now looks like any other contact.

Copycats and lookalikes

One more wrinkle. When an app gets popular with teens, copycats follow. MonkeyCool, for example, trades on the name of the well-known Monkey video chat app. It's a different app from a different developer, with a much smaller safety footprint. Kids download it thinking they've got the real thing.

So you can't go by the name of the app, and your kid can't go by the name of the person on the other end.

What to ask

Skip "why do you have this." It puts them on defence before you've learned anything.

Try these instead:

• "Who have you met on it? Anyone you know in real life?"
• "Have you added anyone from there on Snap?"
• "Has anyone ever asked to meet up, or asked for a photo?"

The last one is the one that matters. Ask it calmly and ask it more than once over time. Kids who feel like they'll get in trouble for the answer don't give it.