Huggle

» see huggle.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Huggle's premise was that you had already met. The app checked you in by GPS wherever you went, and another person's profile only became visible to you once the two of you had been in the same place. You could see the locations you had in common and nothing else, so what it sold you was a near miss: the person who uses your coffee shop at a different hour.

It started with Valerie Stark, who moved from Moscow to London and began reading Instagram's location tags to work out who else spent time where she did. She met Stina Sanders, they decided the habit should be an app, and they took it to Andrey Andreev, who had founded Badoo and backed Bumble. It took six months to build. Huggle App Limited was incorporated in London on 27 March 2015, the soft launch came that year, the official launch in July 2016 on iOS and Android with a Windows Phone build as well, and worldwide availability the October after that.

By September 2017 more than 45 million locations had been logged through it. In February 2018 the team switched the dating mode off for a full day, on the theory that nobody should spend 14 February being told by a phone to find someone. A month later Badoo bought it. Stark stepped down as chief executive and Sanders stayed on inside Badoo to run the Huggle team.

Huggle was built for London and for going out in it. I have never lived in London, and by 2016 my evenings in Ankara were not the kind this app indexed. The mechanic was familiar to me anyway, because every check-in product of the previous decade had tried some version of it and almost all of them were already dead by the time Huggle launched.

~ the dossier ~

~ the check-in ~

Verification was the part they put effort into. To be a real profile you had to send in several selfies and have a team of moderators approve them, and the profile itself was assembled from what you had already written elsewhere, pulling from Facebook and Instagram with Foursquare in there too. You set whether you were after a friend or a date, along with an age range, and then you set how many places someone had to share with you before they were allowed to write to you.

That last control is where the product shows its age. It assumes a user whose phone has been silently logging their locations for long enough to build up a history worth filtering on, which was a reasonable assumption in 2015 and a very uncomfortable one by 2020. Huggle arrived at the tail of the check-in era, after the companies that invented the gesture had already been bought or buried, and it set out to build a dating graph from the location history they had taught everyone to produce.

~ inactive platforms ~

The clearest account of how it ended is in a securities filing. Bumble's registration statement, filed on 15 January 2021 ahead of the listing, explains that on 29 January 2020 the merger that handed Blackstone control of the group was consummated, with Blackstone and Accel putting $2.1 billion in and $2.3 billion going out to the former shareholders, and that "concurrent with the Sponsor Acquisition, the Company also decided to no longer actively maintain and market certain platforms, including Chappy, Lumen and Huggle." The filing gives those three a collective name, "Inactive Platforms," and a reason: the company wanted its resources behind Bumble and Badoo.

So there was no closure announcement and no final day. It was not shut down, it was defined into a category and left running. The website kept serving its own pages until at least 17 January 2021 and had become a redirect to badoo.com by early March, and that seven-week window is the nearest thing to a date of death the public record offers. The app is gone from the App Store. Chappy, named in the same sentence of the same filing, was switched off on a published date in February 2020. Huggle never got one.

~ december 2025 ~

The company itself took another five years to go. Huggle App (UK) Limited, number 09513513, registered at a fourth floor address on Blossom Yard in east London, was incorporated under the shorter name Huggle App Limited and renamed that December. Its last accounts were made up to 31 December 2023, and it was dissolved on 16 December 2025. The app had been unmaintained for almost six years by the time the paperwork caught up with it.

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