Boompi works like most other dating apps—see people on the app based on your geographical location, swipe in a certain direction to indicate whether you want to talk to them, and match with people who also wish to talk to you.
Here’s the catch, though: If you’re a girl, you can invite your female friends to secretly join your private conversations, without your potential suitors ever knowing.
If you’re a girl on Boompi and you start a chat with someone, you can invite your girl friend to eavesdrop on that conversation at any time. Your friend will be able to see every message sent since the beginning of the chat, and leave their own comments in the conversation, which only you will be able to see. And if you aren’t interested in finding a date and only want to read your friends’ chats, you can do that too—Boompi allows female users to use “Ghost Mode,” which makes sure guys never see their profile.
Oddly enough, the Boompi logo is a pineapple, which symbolizes warmth and hospitality.
The privacy implications are obvious: Men can never know for sure that they’re not being talked about in secret. Yet the founders, Barcelona-based Alejandro Ponce and Joan Carles Bartra stand by its design, arguing that girls already share their text messages with their friends through screenshots.
“Gossiping is fun and plays a big part of everyday life because it’s amusing to know what other people are up to,” the company said over email. “With Boompi, instead of sending several screenshots of a conversation asking for the advice of your girl friends, now you can do it seamlessly and in real time.”
Boompi, like the app Luluthat once allowed women to leave positive or negative reviews of guys for other women, would surely be getting more critical reviews if it men were the ones who who could drop in and out of others’ romantic conversations. Asked if they would ever consider opening up the feature to men, or allowing girls to invite male friends to their private chats, the founders said they are continuously working on new features and improvements.