What Just Happened to Blued and Finka?
China's Most Popular Gay Dating Apps Disappeared: What Does It Mean For the Gay Community?
On Tuesday 11th November two of China’s most popular gay dating apps, Blued and Finka, disappeared from the Apple app store. When asked for comment by Wired an Apple spokesman said only that “we follow the laws in the countries where we operate. Based on an order from the Cyberspace Administration of China, we have removed these two apps from the China storefront only.” This lead to panic in the Chinese LGBTQ+ community Tuesday night as fears of a crackdown on queer expression spread on social media and in private group chats. Yet, by Wednesday afternoon Blued had begun to reappear on some app stores. So, what happened?
The Rise and Fall of BluedCity
Blued was launched in 2012 at a time when there was a thawing of attitudes towards the gay community in Chinese society (in this period even the fairly socially conservative state media was reporting on the LGBTQ+ community positively). By 2020, when the parent company BluedCity acquired their greatest rival Finka, Blued had become the largest gay dating app in Asia. That same year the company went public with an opening share price of $20.45. This would quickly rise to $35.89, and by the end of the year BluedCity was reporting an annual revenue of over a billion RMB.
However, this initial success hide a big problem: the company was struggling to find a sustainable way to make Blued or Finka profitable. The fundamental issue was that the apps had developed a reputation for hosting sex workers (something that is illegal in China) and being swarmed with fake accounts, scammers, and catfishing. Yet, the company felt that adding a verification process to deal with this issue would lead to an exodus of users scared of being outed in a society which can still be very socially conservative.
This increasingly dire reputation makes it difficult to attract mainstream advertising revenue while the kind of services that might not care so much about having their brand associated with hook-up culture and sex workers (VPNs, porn sites, gambling apps etc) are all illegal in China.
In 2022 the company’s problems culminated with BluedCity being de-listed - by which point there share price had fallen to $1.54. The company was subsequently bought by a consortium based in Honk Kong. However, the change in ownership did not fix any of the underlying issues. Indeed, based on the anecdotal evidence of queer people I have talked to, the number of scam accounts and sex workers hosted on the apps has only increased since the take-over.
What Is Happening Now?
In my opinion it is fairly unlikely that the disappearance of Finka and Blued on Tuesday is the beginning of a general government crackdown on the gay community for a number of reasons. For one thing while Blued and Finka disappeared from the app store users could still download them straight from the company website, and users who had already downloaded the apps continued to use the service as if nothing had happened. For another thing the company’s various social media accounts remained active throughout, and Blued had begun reappearing in most app stores by Wednesday afternoon. This does not feel like a government crack down even if the initial disappearance was triggered by a government regulatory body.
What seems more likely (at least from where I am sitting) is that China’s online regulatory agencies are running out of patience with a company that seems incapable of ensuring all their users stick within the confines of the law. Online scammers in particular have been a target of government ire in recent years, and it was probably only a matter of time before the relatively loose (by Chinese internet standards) guidelines for users on Blued caught the attention of the authorities.
Yet, the reactions on social media in the hours after the apps were removed from the app store did underline one thing for me: how reliant the Chinese gay community has become on one company for any kind of social connection - many of the posts I saw on social media lamented how difficult it was to meet other gay men without the aid of Finka or Blued.
There seems to be a good chance that Blued and Finka might go off-line permanently at some point in the future either due to an inability to regulate content or because they simply ran out of money. And it looks like the gay community in China doesn’t have anywhere else to go (Grindr is banned from Chinese app stores). That so much of gay life has become tied to the product of one social media company might tell us something very sad about the state of the modern LGBTQ community.