The product
Denga Love is a dating app built for Black users. Not a generic app with a niche label on it — the difference is in the vocabulary and the experience. "Match" became chamego, a word from Kikongo, and the product was designed around that idea of belonging.
It launched in Rio de Janeiro in 2022 and runs today in four languages — Portuguese, Spanish, French and English — on iOS and Android.
What we built
Gabuldev is Denga's engineering team. Not a contractor placed on their board: the engineering behind the product.
The backend is ours. We built it from scratch, and we still maintain it.
The front end was fully rewritten for the current version of the product — not a partial migration, a rewrite.
The mobile app in Flutter, one codebase serving iOS and Android, plus the product's websites.
Along the way, some of the work that holds the business up:
- Subscriptions and VIP activation, including the case where a purchase made on the web failed to activate the plan on the account — revenue collected without the customer receiving what they paid for
- Social login, which is how most users come in
- Four-language support, opening the product beyond Brazil
- A CI/CD pipeline with separate dev and production environments, so shipping a fix doesn't require courage
- Security review of both the app and the backend, done as deliberate work rather than as a reaction to an incident
The result
| App Store | Google Play | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 4.8 | 4.7 |
| Ratings count | 5,900 | 16,700 |
| Downloads | — | 100K+ |
That is over 22,000 ratings combined, above 4.7 on both stores, with releases shipped on both platforms in September 2026.
The volume matters as much as the score. Any app can hold a high rating at launch; holding one across tens of thousands of ratings, with a steady release cycle, is a different claim — it means a live product, still maintained, still getting work years after it shipped.
That only happens when the team that built it is still there.