On October 21, 2026, Singapore-based Lovense published the Lovense Distance Index 2026, a data report on long-distance couples. It is built from 5.036 million anonymised remote sessions logged on the Lovense Remote app between October 2025 and September 2026. Sessions averaged 20.4 minutes, or 102.8 million minutes in total. Lovense adds that up to "196 years of connection" and points out that this is longer than the telephone has existed. The company says the data were aggregated and anonymised and that times are based on the local time at which each session ended on the reporting side.

Why It Matters

This is a marketing report, and it should be read as one. All the data come from one company's app, the methodology is described only in summary, and the session counts can't be checked independently. It is still one of the largest behavioural datasets any teledildonics company has published, and three things in it matter beyond the PR. First, it supports Lovense's long-distance-first positioning at a time when the company is pushing into [touch-responsive couples hardware](/stories/lovense-glint-touch-responsive-plug), [AI-driven strokers](/stories/lovense-solace-ai-nvidia-jetson) and [mainstream consumer-tech shows](/stories/lovense-ifa-berlin-intimate-doll). Second, the cross-border routes show the teledildonics market is international by default. Products and apps have to work across time zones, payment systems and privacy regimes. Third, publishing aggregate usage maps is a privacy choice. Lovense has had its [account-security problems](/stories/lovense-20m-user-security-fallout). Releasing route-level and country-level intimacy data, even anonymised, will invite questions about how much session metadata the company keeps and for how long. The report says anonymisation and aggregation, but gives no retention period. Investors and regulators will want that answer before the next edition.

The findings, as Lovense presents them: - Peak hour: activity peaked between 10 and 11 p.m. local time, which Lovense describes as the phone-on-the-pillow slot. - Repeat use: on 37.8% of the days a partner connected, they came back for a second session. - Valentine's paradox: about 22,000 sessions on February 14, roughly 49% above comparable weekdays, but the median session lasted only 6.6 minutes. On February 15 the median rose to 11.7 minutes. - Japan runs long: within single-country pairs, Japan had the longest sessions. One in ten ran past 62.5 minutes. - Borders: 11 of the top 20 routes connect two countries, and about one in four sessions crossed a national border. Australia–United States was the busiest long-haul pair at 11,800 sessions.

The report also restates how the system works. One partner taps the screen, the command goes over the internet to the other partner's phone, and from there over Bluetooth to the toy. Sessions can run alongside an in-app video call. The person wearing the toy "decides how long it runs and can stop it at any moment." CEO and founder Dan Liu said the company's job is to "keep taking steps out of their way. And to make sure what happens between two people stays between them." Lovense notes that no government counts long-distance couples, so it sets its figures alongside outside numbers: the UN's count of 304 million international migrants in 2024, and a Bowling Green State University estimate that 12.5% of U.S. couples who married in 2023 lived apart.

Sources

Update — 2026-10-22

Initial entry — story first created.