ShopAMan was a dating app belonging to eDarling’s parent company, affinitas GmbH. It combined elements of other successful dating apps such as Tinder, Lovoo, and okcupid to create a new product that pursued dating in the style of a shopping app. The usual shopping metaphors were used so that female users could add interesting male users to their shopping baskets. There were also dating parties in a pop-up store format. The app was discontinued in mid-2015.

In 2014, Steven supported the team for three months as an on-site freelancer during improvement and refinement. The starting point was a kind of hybrid app based on Apache Cordova forks. The app struggled with massive stability and usability problems which were reflected in an average PlayStore rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars. To improve the UX, the web portion was removed and the app completely natively implemented. It was then put through a tough battery of unit and monkey tests. Crashlytics provided reporting of live crashes so that a specific remedy could be found. The second element was the expansion of the app with user profiles and solutions to monetize the app. Rewarded videos were implemented using Fyber and other ad networks. In addition, one-time purchases and subscriptions were integrated via the Google PlayStore. Another new native feature was a chat function linking platform users.

In addition to these development tasks, two ShopAMan back-end developers were trained in Android development. The training took place mainly via pair programming and joint code review meetings.

Overall, app evaluations improved with each release during the three months of the project, reaching 3.7 stars by the end of the project (from the starting point of 2.5).