Pretend for the family, the contract or the revenge — then stop pretending.
We track 53 fake relationship series across the apps we cover. Every one below starts with free episodes.
Where these live: most of this list sits on DramaBox, GoodShort and ReelShort. All are free to download.
Six from the list with their synopses in full, so you can judge the writing before installing anything. Tap any poster below for the same detail on the rest.
Food deliverer Rachel becomes personal assistant to Hollywood star Austin Cooper. Thrust into fame and his vengeful ex's schemes, she never expected pretending to be his girlfriend would be part of the job.
On DramaBox · starts with free episodes
In order to save her terminally ill sister, she was forced to take the place of her selfish cousin and be sacrificed to the rumored cannibalistic and brutal dragon duke. However, she unexpectedly discovered that the "terrifying beast" was actually a peerless beauty. Not only did he dote on her after marriage, but he also allowed her to make a stunning comeback. She married another seemingly good man who treated her cousin poorly, and after learning about the heroine's life, the cousin went insane with jealousy.
On GoodShort · starts with free episodes
"I had been switched at birth for seventeen years. When my wealthy biological parents finally found me, they showed up in patched shirts, pretending to be poor. Together with the fake heiress, Seraphina, they threw me into a condemned building and forced me to repay them fifty thousand dollars every month. Then one day, my mother publicly cursed whoever had framed me, saying they would “go blind and have their legs broken.” The next morning, on the red carpet at a ball, Seraphina’s eyes bled and both her legs snapped. Only then did they fall to their knees before me, screaming, “Who the hell are you?” I lowered my eyes. A flash of dark gold passed through my pupils. “The witch who didn’t burn on the Salem stake three hundred years ago.”"
On ReelShort · starts with free episodes
After rebirth, wild Omega Sierra swaps fiances with her sister to marry mysterious Silvercrest Wolf King Ethan. She fights against schemes and lineage doubts bravely, defeats rivals fiercely and predicts wolf tides with past memories. Her bold charm deeply captivates Ethan, who publicly marks her as his mate. Rising from a substitute bride to the supreme Luna, they unite to build a mighty werewolf empire together.
On ShortMax · starts with free episodes
To discover who truly loves them, wealthy couple Hannah and her husband fake bankruptcy, with him pretending to be paralyzed after a stroke. Their test exposes the truth: their biological son Thomas and his wife refuse to help and turn them away, while adopted son Theo and his wife give up everything to save him. After learning the truth, Hannah and her husband leave their $50 million fortune to Theo. Thomas loses everything and finally realizes that true family is built on love, not blood.
On ReelShort · starts with free episodes
To save her firm, Chloe Taylor weds Arthur Pendelton. Their fake marriage quickly draws deadly rivals. Using his hidden martial and medical genius, Arthur crushes their enemies, helping Chloe develop the Youth Elixir Pill. As romance blooms, Arthur claims ultimate power. Yet, will a darker family secret tear them apart?
On ShortMax · starts with free episodes
They agree to pretend, for the family, the contract or the revenge. Then the pretending stops being work. It overlaps with contract marriage but keeps a distinct pleasure: nobody is bound, so every scene is a choice.
What makes it suit the format is that the arrangement supplies a legitimate reason for the leads to be in the same frame constantly, and a built-in clock, because the deal has an end date and the audience is counting down to it. That is a lot of tension for very little setup.
The good ones make the performance itself the courtship: the leads learning each other's histories in order to lie convincingly, and finding out they like what they learn. The weak ones drop the pretence in the first ten episodes and become an ordinary romance with an awkward premise attached.
Of the 53 fake relationship series we track, the largest share sits on ReelShort — 21 titles, 40% of the list. After that it is DramaBox (10) and GoodShort (6). The remainder is spread across 6 other apps, which is worth knowing before you commit: no single app has this theme cornered.
For context on the leader, ReelShort carries 31,446 series in total across 22 languages, and added 1,857 new titles in the last thirty days. Whether that shelf keeps growing matters more than its size today — our full write-up goes into what it costs and where it falls short.
53% of these carry our Mature story rating (15+) — sustained violence, threat or dark themes such as abuse and grief; stronger language. That is a rating for violence, threat and dark themes, not for romance; the two run independently, so a series can be Mature with barely a kiss in it.
Most of these ratings are provisional: derived from the official synopsis rather than from us watching the series, and marked as such wherever they appear. They deliberately round up, because under-rating a dark plot costs a viewer more than over-rating a gentle one costs us. How our ratings work.
32 of these landed since the start of July 2026, so this is not a static shelf. New titles arrive weekly across the apps, and the monthly round-up tracks what is new.
Two things decide whether you finish a short drama, and neither is the synopsis. The first is how many episodes you get free — every series here opens with some, but the number varies by app and by how heavily a title is being promoted that week. The second is where the paywall lands relative to the first real turn: a series that hooks you at episode three and charges at episode four is a different proposition from one that gives you ten.
Because the apps are free to install and each gives free episodes, the cheapest way to judge is to start the same theme on two of them. Our ranked app comparison covers which ones respect your money and which have the pushiest billing prompts.
Showing 40 of 53. The rest are in the full library.