Why there are no ads in Duoheart

The usual case against advertising in apps is that ads are irritating. That is true and it is the least important part.

The substantive problem is that advertising changes the requirements of the product, and the changes go all the way down to the architecture.

What an ad-supported app has to do

Advertising revenue depends on targeting, and targeting depends on knowing things about the person. So an ad-supported app needs identifiers that persist, needs to share them with networks that can join them up with activity elsewhere, and benefits from knowing as much context as possible.

It also needs attention. Revenue scales with time in the app and with sessions per day, which means the product's interests and the user's interests diverge at a specific point: the moment the user has got what they came for.

An ad-funded product earns more when you stay. A subscription product earns the same whether you stay four minutes or forty.

Why that is particularly bad here

Duoheart is meant to take a few minutes. The intended outcome is that two people answer some questions, read each other's answers, and then put the phone down and talk, or not, and get on with the evening.

That is an actively bad advertising product. Every design decision that makes it better makes it worse as an ad surface: no feed, no infinite scroll, no notifications engineered to pull you back, an experience that ends.

There is no honest way to fund a product like this with advertising, because the funding model would require us to build the opposite product.

The architectural conflict

There is also a harder constraint. Content is encrypted on the devices and we cannot read it.

An advertising business would want that to change, because the content of what a couple writes is exactly the kind of context that makes targeting valuable. A company that sells ads and cannot read its own data is leaving money on the table permanently.

Which means the encryption decision and the funding decision are the same decision, made once. We could not later add advertising without changing the architecture, and that is deliberate.

What subscription means in practice

It means the product is paid for by the people using it, which is the simplest possible arrangement and the one with the fewest hidden parties.

It also means we have to be worth paying for, continuously, which is a more demanding standard than being worth tolerating.

And it means there is a price, which excludes some people, and we would rather state that plainly than pretend a free product has no cost. Free products are paid for, usually with attention and data, and usually by the people least able to evaluate the trade.

The specific promises

No advertising. No advertising identifiers. No sharing of your data with advertising or data brokerage companies. No selling of data, and no arrangement where a partner receives it in exchange for something else.

And no engagement mechanics designed to increase time in the app. Notifications exist to tell you your partner has answered, which is information you asked for, and not to manufacture a reason to open the app.

The honest caveat

Companies change and promises made by one management are not binding on another. The reason we point at the architecture rather than at the promises is that architecture is harder to reverse than a policy.

If you want to evaluate any product's commitment on this, the question is not what it promises. It is what it would have to rebuild in order to break the promise.