Look out for these cheating apps on your partner's phone
Lifestyle
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3:00 PM on Tuesday, July 8
By Dan Ketchum for PeopleWin, Stacker
Look out for these cheating apps on your partner's phone
Not to be the bearers of bad news, but unfortunately, suspicions that your partner is cheating can't always be chalked up to simple paranoia or anxiety. According to a survey done by the Survey Center on American Life in 2023, 46% of women and 34% of men reported that they've been cheated on by their partner or spouse. Another Institute for Family Studies found that 11% of married people under 40 are still active on dating apps. And let's just say smartphones don't exactly make cheating harder.
Of course, not every hunch is reality, and having faith in your partner is a super healthy thing to hold on to. If the vibes do seem off, though, finding any of these cheating apps on your significant other’s phone can be a huge red flag — or at the very least, the start of a very serious conversation. PeopleWin profiles the most concerning apps.
Most Common Cheating Apps
From highway directions to counting steps to grabbing takeout, there are few things in life that apps don’t make easier. While legit dating apps — you know, the kind designed for single people or those in consensually open relationships — make finding a romantic match easier, too, the internet infidelity rabbit hole goes a whole lot deeper.
In 2024, some of the most popular dating apps include eHarmony, Bumble, Tinder, Hinge, Happn, and Coffee Meets Bagel. Any of these showing up on your committed partner’s phone should give you pause, but even more concerning are straight-up, purpose-made cheating apps. These sketchy apps are more specifically designed for prowling partners to find illicit affairs, so seeing any one of them installed on your boo’s phone should set off alarm bells.
Ashley Madison
Perhaps the biggest name in cheating apps with one of the biggest user bases, Ashley Madison boasts 75 million member accounts and ushers in 15,000 new users daily. Ashley’s main goal is to facilitate extramarital sex, and it says so right on the tin. The app allows users to digitally hide their faces in photos, and it lets women browse for free while men have to pay, so you know what’s going on here.
Seeking
Seeking is a tricky one. It’s kind of like a cheating app with plausible deniability. Seeking originally started as SeekingArrangement in 2006, where that “arrangement” was understood to be between a young, attractive girlfriend or boyfriend and a wealthy benefactor — a.k.a., a “sugar baby” setup.
Seeking now has sleeker branding that focuses on “hypergamy,” which is essentially the practice of dating upward, which can very much translate to hooking up with a sugar daddy or sugar mama. Features like income verification and advertising over one million millionaires on the platform are dead giveaways for what's going down.
Cheating Websites
While these services don’t have dedicated cheating apps for Android or iOS, they do facilitate infidelity the old-fashioned way: in a browser window. If any of these websites come up in your other half’s browser or search history, you might have a little talking to do.
- Victoria Milan. Why are two of these sketchy dating services just fancy-sounding women’s names? Anyway, this site is the number one browser-based service for “married and attached dating,” with anonymity features, high-security standards, over 20,000 daily matches, and a ratio of 53% women to 47% men, making it a little more gender-balanced than its competitors.
- Adult Friend Finder. It may position itself as a regular dating site, but we all know what’s up with Adult Friend Finder. A) We don’t call our SOs our “adult friends,” and B) those membership prices are just a little too scandalous. As Cleveland Scene puts it, “An affair is waiting for you there. Look at AFF as a sexual affair jungle with daters waiting for prey.”
Hookup Apps
While finding any kind of dating app on your partner’s phone can definitely be sus, dating-focused apps such as Hinge, Badoo, Clover, and Bumble do actually have options for matching with platonic friends and even business partners. These racy options, on the other hand, aren’t necessarily cheating apps, but they’re dating apps that have a reputation for mostly facilitating casual hookups.
Very few people are looking for “friends” on these apps, unless those friends happen to have benefits:
- Grindr positions itself as the number one free dating app for the LGBTQ+ community, but it most definitely has a rep as a hookup app. Straight from the horse's mouth, Grindr “is an indispensable tool for LGBTQ travelers,” which certainly seems to emphasize a quick fling more so than a committed relationship.
- Feeld’s pitch is a “dating app for the curious,” focusing on open-minded, nontraditional romantic encounters. Nothing wrong with that on its own, but Feeld’s appeal to “anyone looking for an exciting, new type of dating experience” may appeal to unfaithful lovers, too.
Sometimes, online infidelity happens without any sort of cheating app at all. While these secret texting apps don’t have any of the romantic sheen of dating or hookup apps and often have a legit place in sectors that call for more security, they certainly can be and certainly are used by cheaters to carry on clandestine conversations. Some of the most common secret texting apps include:
- Signal: A messaging app with a focus on encryption that keeps texts, voice messages, videos, and pics private, so they’re only accessible to the senders and recipients — even Signal’s own team can’t access them. Not a sure sign of cheating, but you can definitely see the allure here.
More Sneaky Tricks
Perhaps a little more obscure and a lot more sneaky, some cheaters use apps that aren’t explicitly focused on chatting, but that do offer direct message features — such as mobile games — to obfuscate their online convos.
By no means does this mean that the games and apps on your partner’s phone are hidden cheating app icons, but if you already have reason to investigate, be aware that friendly-looking game-like apps such as Hago, Plato, RecRoom, and AmongChat are just some options with low-key chat features. Much more devious, Calculator Pro+ can fairly be considered a hidden cheating app icon — it’s a functioning calculator with a calculator-themed icon that hides a fully featured secret texting app.
Beat Them at Their Own Game
You know your partner better than anyone, so you’ll know when any of these cheating apps — or just slightly eyebrow-raising apps — call for further action, whether it’s a quick “hey, what’s the deal with that app?” or a difficult, face-to-face sit down.
At the end of the day, trust is the cornerstone of any strong relationship — but if something doesn’t sit right, it’s okay to look into it. While apps can sometimes raise red flags, behavior matters even more. If you're noticing other warning signs and feel the need to dig a little deeper, a quick people search might give you the clarity you need to make informed decisions about your relationship.
This story was produced by PeopleWin and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
