When you are looking for a casual fling, you want a hookup app that is dedicated to helping you find like-minded people. You are not interested in an app that also tries to be everything for everybody else.

Ease of use, privacy, and effectiveness — that’s what you need. CasualX is a hookup app that promotes itself as offering just that — what you need and only what you need for no-strings-attached encounters.

We reviewed CasualX to find out if its actual performance lives up to its promotional rhetoric.

See if CasualX made it on our List of the 5 Best Hookup Sites to Use in 2017

— Pros and Cons —

Pros

• Membership focused solely on casual sexual encounters
• Available for iPhone and Android devices
• Advanced privacy protection features

Cons

• Paid membership required for messaging
• Small membership base
• 10 to 1 male to female ratio

— In-Depth Casualx App Review —

On the CasualX official web page, it describes its service as “CasualX – The best casual sex app only for NSA fun (no strings attached dating). Join for free. Find one night stands, FWB (friends with benefits), swinging, affairs and other adult hookups.”

After spending a little time on the CasualX platform you soon realize exactly what that means. The entire app is focused strictly on casual sexual encounters. Unlike other hookup apps — such as Tinder — no inch of screen real estate, no feature, no time is spent on facilitating any other type of relationship except for honest to goodness casual sexual encounters. This creates a user base that is more sincere and more likely to yield results. Only open-minded individuals and couples are found as members. Marital status, sexual orientation, and gender identification are not an issue on CasualX. Anyone can join as long as they are open to the idea of encounters free of commitments and emotional attachment.

— Available Platforms for CasualX —

 

CasualX is a mobile-only app that is available for iPhone and Android devices. On the iTunes App Store, it has a 4.5-star rating based on 540 reviews. On GooglePlay it achieves only a 3.1-star rating based on 195 reviews. During our tests, we did not encounter any significant differences in performance on either the iPhone or Android version of the app. Both performed reliably and none of our testers encountered any performance related issues during the four days of continuous testing. As such, we are unable to offer an explanation for the huge discrepancy in ratings found on each of the repositories.

— Registration and Privacy —

After you download the CasualX app you will notice how this app takes privacy and security as a top priority. You will notice that the registration process takes a few turns away from the traditional registration process for a hookup app. While you must select a user name, password and provide a valid email address, on CasualX you will find two additional steps. First, you must create a lock pattern on your phone’s screen to access the app. Second, your account profile is not automatically activated on the CasualX system. Each new account is manually verified to ensure that it belongs to a real person. During our testing, this manual review process took from 20 minutes to as much as eight hours. Once your profile is approved you are notified via push notification as well as email.

In our opinion, the addition of the pattern lock may be overkill. From our point of view, a simple PIN would suffice. Regarding the manual verification of new accounts — this we found to be a net positive. Yes, it can be inconvenient. It can be a hookup buzz kill if you want instant gratification when you first join. Later on, however, you will appreciate it. This added verification serves as an effective barrier against trolls, fake profiles, and bots.

— Membership Base —

CasualX does not publically release official figures regarding its membership. By our estimation, the app has over 500,000 members with roughly 200,000 being active. The male to female ratio is 10:1. This is quite high — especially when the user base is under one million. Our testers found that this disparity created gaps in finding potential partners.

Our male testers made 120 overtures to women — only eight received a reply. That’s less than a seven percent response rate!

Our three female testers, as you would expect, had the opposite problem. Over a four-day period, they received a total of 872 overtures from male members.

— Features —

CasualX offers two main features. One of these is called “Moments.” This allows users to look at individual profiles and view a social media-style feed of posts and status updates from that user. This is helpful in determining if a member is truly in synch with what you are looking for in a casual encounter.

The other feature is a swipe-based discovery mode. This uses the all too familiar swipe right to like, swipe left to pass, method of finding a match.

Search functionality on CasualX is adequate. It offers users basic filtering, such as by age, gender, and location. It does not, however, offer advanced filtering, such as by specific physical attributes, sexual fetish, etc.

The communications features on CasualX consist of an internal email platform and online chat.

While not rich in features, the few that CasualX does offer perform well. The entire user interface is easy to navigate and intuitive to operate.

— Cost of CasualX App —

CasualX is free to download, install and register. You can access the app and navigate through it as a free member, but you will be limited in what you can do. While you will be able to conduct searches and scroll through the “Moments” feature, you will not be able to initiate or respond to messages. In order to activate the communication features, you must upgrade to a paid membership. This has a cost of $14.99 for a one-month membership. Alternatively, you could pay for six months in advance for $54.99.