Say what you’re looking for, up front.

Pune holds two populations at once: a large student body that turns over every few years, and an IT workforce settling in for the long run. They are frequently on the same dating app, frequently in the same age bracket, and frequently looking for completely different things without either party saying so.

That mismatch is the single most common way dating here goes wrong. Nobody misled anybody. The information just wasn’t on the table until somebody had already got invested.

• You state what you're looking for at signup — long-term, casual, or new friends — and it appears on your profile.
• You can change that answer any time. People's intentions shift, and the app shouldn't hold them to an old one.
• Every profile is photo- and identity-verified before it can appear to anyone.
• A small daily set of people rather than an infinite deck, so profiles get read instead of skimmed.
• Distance-sorted across Koregaon Park, Baner, Aundh, Viman Nagar, Kothrud, Hinjewadi and Kharadi.

There’s a fear that stating intent kills the spontaneity — that it turns meeting someone into a filtered database query. In practice the opposite happens. Knowing you both want roughly the same thing takes an anxious, unspoken question off the table, and what remains is the part that was always the good bit: finding out whether you actually like each other.