Does he like me? Or am I wasting my time?

I have a friend who I met online through a dating app 4 months ago. We have become very close through many personal conversations, by text message and video chats. I think I love him. He’s in love with someone else who’s already rejected him. I think I’m friend zoned at this point. Sometimes he tells me about guys he is planning to meet, or is chatting with and it kills me to hear it, but I always try and support and listen to him. He comes to me to talk about his emotional problems. I always listen. Every once in a while he does or says something that makes me think he wants more from our relationship. For example, he tells me a lot that he “misses me”. He also has little pet names he calls me (i.e. my babybear, and carebear). One day I misspelled “horny guy” as “hony guy” (I was talking about how all guys want from dating apps is sex). After that he said, “I want to be your honey”. So jokingly I started calling him “honey” whenever he calls me “babybear”.

So the other day I told him about the local guys who message me on the dating app we originally met on. I took a screenshot of a message and sent it to him. The guy opens the message by unlocking the pictures on his profile, he then follows up that message with “can i ses your c**k ? =) youre cute”. I thought we would both have a good laugh about it. I didn’t give my friend any other information about the guy, but because of the screenshot he could see his thumbnail pic of his face in the corner. My friend laughs it off at first. The next time we talk he mentions that he “checked that guy out” and said he didn’t seem very intelligent. Now what this means is that he went through the trouble of looking for people in my area to find this person. He didn’t even have a name, just a tiny thumbnail pic of his face. Not a lot to go by. It just seems like a lot of work to do for someone who is just a friend.

I’m sorry I took too long to get to the point here, but is there a chance he could like me more than a friend? Is it possible I live just outside the friend zone? He just sends me so many mixed messages. I hate to bring this up, because I don't want to offend him and I don’t want to lose him as a friend. I do really hope to meet him one day.