Two phones cross paths. Nothing else travels.
Here, without the marketing, is what the app really does: what your phone broadcasts, what it listens for, what the server does with it, and what the other person can see of you at each stage.
1. Your phone broadcasts an anonymous token
In the background, DareCrush broadcasts a sixteen-byte beacon over Bluetooth. It is not your name, not your account number, not a location: it is an encrypted block, unreadable to anyone without the server's key.
That beacon changes every fifteen minutes. A hostile device parked on a street could not follow you: from one window to the next, nothing shows that it is the same phone twice. The app downloads a week of beacons in advance, which is what lets it keep working with no network at all.
Bluetooth carries nothing else. No photo, no profile field, no GPS coordinate goes over the radio. It exists only to establish that two phones were physically close.
2. It listens, and notes what it hears
At the same time, the app listens for other people's beacons. For an encounter to count, the signal has to be strong enough: we average several readings over a few seconds, which works out to roughly a few metres — the same room, or the same sidewalk. Not through a wall, not from one floor to another.
These observations pile up in a local queue on your phone and are sent to the server in batches every few minutes, over HTTPS. If you're on the subway with no signal, they wait their turn.
Only one of the two phones needs to have seen the other for the encounter to exist. That avoids missed connections when one device was in a pocket or in deep sleep.
3. The server works out who crossed whom
Only the server can decrypt a beacon and find the account behind it. Along the way it checks that the beacon is genuine, that it belongs to the right time window, and that neither account has blocked the other. Then it creates the encounter on both sides and notifies you both.
A cooldown stops you from endlessly re-encountering the same person: if you see each other every morning on the same bus, the app gradually spaces it out and tells you instead that you regularly cross paths in this area.
The raw observations are destroyed as soon as they're processed. Only the encounter itself remains.
4. Your filters apply before you see anything at all
Gender preference and age range are applied on the server, at the moment the encounter is created. Someone outside your criteria isn't “hidden” — they never enter your feed in the first place. Gender preference is never overridden, by any plan.
This visibility is fixed on each side and can therefore be asymmetric: you may see someone who cannot see you, because their own criteria don't include you.
5. The match, then the contact details
In your feed you can like (which is final), favourite to stop the profile expiring, or pass. Without a mutual like the profile disappears by itself — after 24 hours on a free account, after 7 days on a paid plan. The person never learns that you liked them.
Two likes make a match. It opens the full description and the conversation. But not the contact details.
The two-step match. Your number, your Instagram or your Telegram only become visible once both of you have tapped “share my contact details”. It is a separate consent, deliberately irreversible, and it is never behind a payment.
6. Messages we cannot read
The conversation is end-to-end encrypted. A message is encrypted on your phone with the other person's public key and can only be decrypted by their device. The private key is sealed inside your phone's hardware keystore and is never sent to us.
In practice: our servers store an opaque encrypted block and pass it along. Faced with a lawful demand from authorities, we can provide metadata — who wrote to whom, and when — never the content, because we don't have it.
The server is a queue, not an archive: a delivered message is purged within 30 days. The real archive of your conversations is your phone.
7. Before you meet in person
An online connection eventually becomes a real one. The app is built for that moment:
- Meeting up — you declare in the app that you are about to meet someone. That declaration exists for your safety and could be shared with authorities on a valid legal request in the event of an incident.
- Safety location sharing — you send someone you trust a link, valid for 1 to 12 hours, that follows your live location. The link shows a position and timestamps, never your identity or the other person's, and switches itself off at the deadline.
- Blocking — immediate, silent, effective both ways, and it expires both accounts' beacons so you can never cross paths again.
- Reporting — from a match or from a plain encounter. Reports are reviewed by a human team, and an account that accumulates them is pulled from other people's encounters pending review.
8. What about the battery?
Bluetooth listening is designed to be frugal: it runs in short, spaced-out cycles and only tightens up when you're somewhere busy or in event mode. Four settings let you strike your own balance between responsiveness and battery life.
A persistent notification tells you detection is running — Android requires it, and it is also honest: you always know when the app is working. If detection stops for more than five minutes, a banner warns you and explains what to do, with steps tailored to your phone's brand.
9. What the app does not do
- It does not say where you are right now. An encounter may carry an approximate location, only if you accepted location sharing, and never in real time for anyone else.
- It does not tell you whether the other person saw you. Whether an encounter was detected by one side or both stays internal: showing it would amount to telling you “this person never noticed you”.
- It does not verify anyone's identity or background. An encounter proves physical proximity, not good intentions. Stay careful.
- It does not sell anything. No data is handed to brokers or ad networks for targeting.
All that's left is to try it.
The hard part is already done: you cross paths with dozens of people every day.