How this sex-forward gay cruising site finally launched an Apple-approved iOS app

As an app designed to facilitate gay hookups, popular site Sniffies has had a limitation since it started in 2018—it was only accessible via web browser. Until Monday, when the map-based cruising site debuted its Apple-approved iOS app. 

Building an app that complies with Apple’s notoriously stringent content moderation—and total ban on apps that directly serve adult content—was a challenge for Sniffies, which wears its sexuality proudly. Its users, which it calls “cruisers,” do, too. Many users put nude images as their cover photos, meaning adult content is visible from the second the platform is opened in a browser. 

The company needed to tame the experience for Apple to get on board, without losing what most users come to Sniffies for: sex. “We needed to be very strategic about this, to get around Apple’s strict not safe for work content policies, but also keep the magic of Sniffies,” says Eli Martin, Sniffies’ chief marketing officer. “The key was giving cruisers control of the experience.” 

How Sniffies met Apple’s content safety standards

Sniffies leadership weren’t begging to get on the App Store. Its web app format worked well, particularly for the men who aren’t out or are exploring their sexuality, who Martin says make up a core—and growing—part of its user base. But fans wanted a native app, and it was difficult to compete with the market’s heavyweights like Grindr without the App Store’s discovery tools. When they finally decided to make the move, the Sniffies team looked to bigger apps like Reddit and X, both of which host explicit content, as models. 

Similar to those sites’ apps, when you download the new Sniffies app, it is in  “Vanilla mode” (internally, the company calls this “deep safe”). Anything explicit is blurred; to unblur the photos, users must follow a link to the browser version, where they can change their settings. Then, the app will respond to the changed settings and allow users to see graphic content. 

“There was certainly back-and-forth with the App Store and figuring out how to make it work on both ends,” Martin says, estimating the process lasted about a year and a half. “It took way longer than we thought, but it seems like Apple was very open to us being a part of the store as long as we could meet the guidelines.” 

They had to make some concessions. Sniffies’ anonymous log-in function, which allowed users to enter with only a birthdate, won’t be accessible through the iOS app.(This anonymous log-in feature has left the door open to the abuse of minors, per The Information.)  There’s a “friction” to the process of creating an account that will be necessary in the App Store, Martin says; users can’t just download and see the map. But there are also benefits: Some users report the map being faster, and the app’s notification system is now more robust than it was just with the web version. 

Preserving the cruising spirit

While the company doesn’t yet know which audiences will gravitate towards which mediums, Martin has his suspicions. Those “DL and curious” guys, as he describes them, will likely stay on the webapp, not wanting to download something to their phone. (This is a problem with Grindr, he points out: Users download and delete the app, over and over.) But the iOS launch opens them up to a new audience: the users that were never going to navigate to the Sniffies link. 

This audience was loud. Martin recounts years of comments across the Sniffies social media, begging them to get in the App Store. His team is now going through each and every one of these comments, telling them to download.

App users are also privvy to the larger brand world that Sniffies has built around its main offering. The company has invested deeply in its (often explicit) marketing, which spans an apparel shop, its Hush lifestyle blog, and its Cruising Confessions podcast. The company has also sponsors in-person events and parties, echoing the pushes from other dating apps. 

Even in the app store, Sniffies proclaims that it is “for cruisers, by cruisers.” Martin points out that the company’s marketing strategy is based on “foreplay,” teasing the app’s sexuality without being completely blatant with it. They can do that in the app store, too.

But does Martin see access to a mainstream audience as a threat to the more clandestine nature of the web app that made Sniffies unique? 

“I personally am not too worried about that,” Martin says. “We’ve only seen better results for cruisers the larger we’ve gotten. The important thing is the culture. We’ve already set the groundwork.”

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