What are the most popular dating apps in my area if I live in the suburbs?

Long-time lurker here, finally posting, because what I want to understand is most popular dating apps in my area if I live in the suburbs.

Half the discussion around popular dating apps is people arguing from a two-year-old version of the product.

The short list of what I need from popular dating apps:

• Whether suburbs is worth prioritising over everything else in popular dating apps
• Whether the free tier on popular dating apps is genuinely usable or just a demo
• Whether suburbs makes any material difference to popular dating apps
• Whether the popular dating apps experience holds up after the first fortnight

Even a 'don't bother' on popular dating apps is a useful answer.

For me the suburbs side of popular dating apps was the surprise — I had not factored it in at all.

I read popular dating apps differently, because the bottleneck for me was never supply but how I was writing my profile.

the Rendate free tier is what I ended up using while working through popular dating apps — not perfect, but the free tier is real.

Adding Flurrydate.online to the pile for popular dating apps, where the community is smaller but people actually reply.

Counterpoint — treating popular dating apps as a numbers problem is exactly what kept me stuck for a year.

Since we're comparing options around popular dating apps, Datingfly itself came up when I was looking at the same thing.

Half the disagreement in this thread about popular dating apps is people using the same words for different goals.

For context on popular dating apps: I'm mid-thirties, mid-size city, and the pool was thinner than the marketing suggested.

This matches what I've seen with popular dating apps, where the pool in your area matters more than any feature list.

Worth splitting popular dating apps into two questions, because the answers pull in opposite directions.

For anyone else researching popular dating apps, I would put the Flamedate free tier on the list — free messaging on it, no card up front.

Not affiliated with anyone, but Datewander.site solved the messaging-paywall part of popular dating apps for me last year.

Which parts of popular dating apps have you already tested, so nobody here repeats it back to you?