Its three creators are anonymous college students. They claim to have built the app in just two hours. Yet Bang With Friends is the simplest, most disruptive app Facebook has seen in a long time.

Editor’s Note Read more about how the app’s creators are evolving its usability.

The premise is so obvious, you’ll kick yourself for not thinking of it first. You install the app, then the app lists your Facebook friends of the opposite sex. You click if you’d like to “bang” them, and no one ever knows . . . that is, unless one of those friends installed the app and elected to bang you, too. Bang With Friends makes finding a mate as easy as window shopping on Pinterest.





“We wanted to keep it simple,” one of the creators tells Co.Design. “See your friends, choose your potential bangs, and then get notified privately via email when you have a match. Wham, bam, thank you new friend with benefits!”

With my wife’s permission, I took Bang With Friends for a spin. After installing the app, I was greeted by a Pinterest-y wall of potential hook-ups: An old co-worker. A friend from high school. A cousin. A minor. A dude. My wife. Lots of my friends’ wives. My mother-in-law, but, thank god, at least not my mom (apparently, there’s at least one filter at work here). With the touch of a button, my vote was cast. I opted just for my wife–really! Part of me hopes she accepts. Part of me hopes she never experiences the oddity of seeing her friends and relatives as a list of potential DTFs.

A few smarter filters would no doubt, make the app less inherently awkward (it’s hard to believe that family members should make the list). But then again, filters imply a certain level of judgement. And if Bang With Friends is anything, it’s a nonjudgmental corner of your social, digital life in which you can let your basest impulses run wild. For however frat-boy-centric the app may be marketed, it’s solving one of the biggest problems in social networking: How do you have an intimate conversation in a room full of your relatives? And how do you leverage all this amazing connectivity to take a leap of faith, without leaving a permanent, devastating trail of evidence?





Since launching about a week ago, the team claims to have matched 10,000 couples, and due to overwhelming user demand, they’re working on an update that will bring LGBT matching. A mobile app is in the works, too, but they wouldn’t comment as to their current state of funding.

Bang With Friends