Miroma Project Factory delivers innovative, bespoke dating app for Amazon Prime’s new reality dating show ‘Date My Mate’

Miroma Group’s digital development studio Miroma Project Factory has built a new bespoke dating app especially for Amazon Prime’s new reality dating show ‘Date My Mate’ that aired on 1st March 2023 and is narrated by Laura Whitmore. 

The dating app built by Miroma Project Factory is specifically tailored to the show’s premise, which sees 25 singles go through a matching, talking and meeting stage meant to replicate the real-life dating scene. As participants swipe through potential suitors live on their TV screens, friends and family members are there to witness the conversations and provide their opinions in real-time. 

The app, which is the first of its kind to be developed for a TV show, was designed in record time to seamlessly integrate into the format of the show, allowing for a realistic dating-app like experience but with curated and editorial control that would allow TV executives to produce content suitable to their filming needs. As the show is centred on the users’ reactions to and interactions with the app, an appealing and familiar design that did not cause any unwanted interruptions were key considerations in the design process.

The app allowed the group of singles starring in the show to swipe to find love amongst a wider pool of pre-screened daters, generating the same excitement as every-day use and evoking genuine unscripted reactions. Other unique features of the app, including a “second-date trigger” and dynamic moderated chat, helped generate these TV-worthy moments. The integration of swipes and animations on each card as the user progressed added visual interest and playfulness that contributed to the natural flow of the show.

In reality, the app, which is proprietary to Miroma Project Factory, contained a ‘Producer Portal’ that allowed producers to view, match and manage users prior to or during filming. Using data from the custom-reporting features of the app, producers could build customised swipe feeds for TV cast members that could be dynamically updated in real time during filming.

The combined features of the app made it possible for these production decisions to be made autonomously by the producers, opening the door for an easily modifiable and replicable format for any future seasons and spanning different country and language formats. Across the first season of the show, the app facilitated 2,360 swipes for the 25 primary users, with more than 369 people using the app in total and the potential for endless combinations and arrangements to be made moving forward.

Kat Robinson, Global CEO at Miroma Project Factory, said: “Despite building the app in record time, we were able to create something with full functionality via a Flutter cross platform and complex matching algorithms. It is great to see our work being used in this way – to engage people across the UK and Ireland with experiences that many single people are having every day.”

Richard Bond, Managing Director for Dragonfly Film & TV, said: “Date My Mate is an innovative new format that will resonate with the millions of people who have been swiping left and right in the hope of finding love over the past decade. Miroma Project Factory has been instrumental in bringing the show to life with a fantastically slick dating app that delivered a great experience for both the producers and the participants.”

The show relied on the app as the key tool, and this had to be easy to use, visually interesting and delivered seamlessly prior to filming. Miroma Project Factory produced the app in a compressed 10-week timeframe, and gave the client a dynamic asset that will continue to evolve with their production needs