BoysDo vs Scruff: The Tribes App vs. a Place to Look Without Being Asked Anything
Two Apps That Both Care About Specificity, Built for Two Completely Different Things
Scruff has, since 2010, done something that most of its competitors don't bother with: it took the diversity of gay male body type and identity seriously enough to build the app around it. The tribes — bear, otter, wolf, cub, daddy, jock, twink, geek, leather and the rest — gave users a vocabulary for who they were and who they were looking for that Grindr's blank profile field never offered. The Match function added consent into the act of expressing interest. The community skewed older, more confident, less hostile to anyone whose body didn't fit the twink / jock binary.
Within its category, Scruff is among the better apps. It also is, structurally, an app for meeting people. Which means it is the wrong tool entirely if what you want is the experience of looking at gay erotic photography for an hour without anyone messaging you.
What "Looking" Actually Is
There is a specific use case the dating apps have never been built for: the gay viewer who wants to spend time with images of the male body without that time leading anywhere. Not because he has nobody to meet. Because the act of looking, on its own, is one of the things he wants to do — the same way someone might spend an hour with a photography monograph in a bookshop with no intention of buying it.
This is not what dating apps are for. Profiles are not photographs in this sense. They are CVs with skin showing. The grid is not a feed in the magazine sense. It is a queue of people available for transaction. Even the most aesthetically thoughtful dating app — and Scruff is one of the more thoughtful ones — is a place where the looking is supposed to lead somewhere, where staying too long without messaging starts to feel like an evasion of the platform's actual purpose.
BoysDo does the looking part. That's the whole product.What Scruff Does That BoysDo Doesn't
Worth being clear about: Scruff is the better tool for the job Scruff is built for. If you want to meet bears in your city, Scruff is what you open. The geolocation grid, the tribes filtering, the in-app chat, the travel mode — all of it is constructed around the act of two specific people deciding to be in the same room. BoysDo cannot do this and is not trying to.
What's worth noticing is that for a substantial part of the gay audience, those are two separate appetites. The desire to meet someone tonight and the desire to look at beautiful photographs of bodies are both real, and neither one cancels the other, and pretending you can serve both from the same UI has produced apps that do both jobs imperfectly. Scruff does the meeting better than it does the looking. BoysDo does the looking — and only the looking — and is the better tool for that.
What's Actually on Scruff vs. What's Actually on BoysDo
Scruff's images are, by the structure of the platform, profile photos and unlocked private albums. The image is connected to a person who is potentially within messaging distance, which colours the looking — every photograph implies a transaction. The aesthetic standard of the average Scruff profile is whatever the user's phone camera produced in their bathroom or bedroom, which is fine for what the platform is for and unrelated to what an art-erotic platform would publish.
BoysDo's images are made photographs. Lit, framed, intended for looking. They aren't tied to a profile that wants to know if you're free Saturday. The looking is the entire transaction.
The Honest Recommendation
Keep Scruff for what it does. Use BoysDo for the part of your gay digital life that has nothing to do with meeting anyone. The two coexist on a phone without competing, because they are not competing.
[Open the app that's only for looking →](https://boysdo.com)
Read our full guide: [Where to Find Artistic Gay Erotic Content Online](/articles/guide-where-to-find-artistic-gay-erotic-content)