Two of the biggest names in American online dating are rethinking the product that built their businesses.
Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd summed up the shift on an Aug. 5 earnings call, saying the company is moving away from “optimizing for swipe speed and velocity” toward “something more intentional, fewer, better, and more considered signals.” A day earlier, Match Group CEO Spencer Rascoff said Tinder’s Events tab, an in-app feature that shows users local activities they can attend together, had expanded to 10 U.S. and European cities since March, with plans to reach 75 by year’s end.
The rethink comes as the industry’s core numbers soften. Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, ended the second quarter with 13.3 million paying users, down 6% from a year earlier, while Tinder’s monthly active users fell 7%. Bumble’s paying users dropped 16.4% to 3.2 million. Both companies are charging more per subscriber to offset the shrinking base. Global dating app downloads have now fallen for six straight years since their 2019 peak, and category revenue slipped for the first time last year, to roughly $6.07 billion, according to Business of Apps.
The moves point to a reversal in online dating. For more than a decade, dating apps focused on volume: more profiles, more matches, and more messages, all based on the theory that scale eventually produces a date. Now, some of the industry’s biggest players are betting the next era will be about showing users fewer profiles and getting them offline faster.
Gen Z is driving that shift. Younger daters grew up with dating apps already in existence—unlike millennials and Gen X who had to get used to them—but researchers say they are increasingly frustrated by endless choices and conversations that go nowhere. Dating companies are responding with better matchmaking, more in-person experiences, and AI.
Swiping ‘left’ on swiping itself
The swipe endured because it was good at something other than matchmaking.
“When you open an app, they want you to keep swiping,” Kathryn Coduto, an assistant professor of media science at Boston University who researches dating apps, told Fortune. “That’s how they’re getting your attention.”
The cost of that design shows up even after the match. In Coduto’s surveys and interviews, users burn out over the dead ends that follow. People don’t respond. Others engage and disappear. Weeks of conversation can pass without producing a face-to-face meeting.
Liesel Sharabi, an associate professor at Arizona State University who directs its Relationships and Technology Lab, sees a similar problem with too much choice.
“It becomes a game of quantity over quality,” Sharabi told Fortune.
The stakes are particularly high with Gen Z. Unlike millennials who remember dating before Tinder and Bumble, younger daters grew up with online dating already embedded in romantic culture.
“For them, dating culture really is dating-app culture,” said Sharabi, who also serves as a relationship science advisor to dating app Hily.
But that doesn’t mean Gen Z is fully abandoning the apps. Coduto said younger users still tend to have the highest use rates, and the apps have become common enough that people keep them regardless of how often they open them.
What ‘fewer’ and ‘better’ looks like
If matchmaking algorithms were strong enough, Sharabi said, users wouldn’t need to sort through hundreds of people in the first place.
“You could conceivably get five profiles, and then one of those people is going to be somebody you go on a date with,” she said. “You don’t need to swipe.”
Bumble is already reworking some of its mechanics. On Aug. 11, it ended its signature requirement that women initiate heterosexual matches, extended the reply window from 24 hours to 72, and began prompting users who send one-word openers to try again. In an internal 2024 survey, 66% of 2,267 women on Bumble in the U.S. said they preferred men to initiate.
But Coduto said the more useful fix may be changing how conversations start rather than who starts them. Daters are already drawn to intentional conversation starters of the kind Hinge has built its product around, she wrote, and for Bumble, “having more prompts to get conversations started, rather than designating a person as the starter, could be really helpful.”
Coduto’s research also suggests daters may be part of the problem. In a 2024 study of 37 dating app users, Coduto and co-author Jesse Fox found daters sent generic openers themselves while writing off matches who did the same, holding others to a standard they didn’t meet.
The version where you meet IRL
Users aren’t trading the apps for real life so much as doing both. Coduto said more people are downloading dating apps while also seeking out in-person experiences, with the offline events increasingly complementing the swiping rather than replacing it.
What’s changing is how much dating companies are building their apps around it.
Bumble is testing a standalone app called Plans for curated in-person events, with the ability to match with attendees afterward. Wolfe Herd described the concept as “meet first, match later.”
“Group socializing is a real part of how Gen Z prefers to meet,” Wolfe Herd told analysts.
Tinder is making a similar bet with its Events tab, which surfaces local outings such as trivia nights, ceramic classes, and beach tennis. Rascoff said 71% of eligible 18- to 24-year-old users engaged with the feature during its Los Angeles pilot, and more than half returned the following week.
Coduto expects more of it, including suggested date nights and partnerships with local businesses. But she said the strategy runs into a problem specific to the industry: Apps need a steady base of people logging in, and they also need the success stories that attract everyone else.
“A success story for a dating app is ultimately deleting it,” she said. “There aren’t many other industries where your users’ best-case scenario is deleting your product.”
But that tension is also baked into what dating apps were originally designed to do. “They were always meant to be introduction services,” Sharabi said. “The dating was always supposed to happen offline.”
AI is the wild card
AI adds another complication. Users already use it to write profiles and draft messages, Sharabi said, which forces dating companies to decide how much of it belongs inside their products.
“You don’t even know how much of it is the other person and how much of it is artificial,” Sharabi said.
Bumble is building an AI system called Bee, a matchmaker that learns users’ values, goals, and communication style through private conversations and then recommends matches, telling both people why they were paired. It was meant to power a separate experience called Dates, which the company introduced in March as a way to surface a small number of curated matches instead of a feed of profiles to sort through. But Wolfe Herd drew a boundary around its role on the earnings call.
“Let me be clear: Bee is not replacing the swipe,” Wolfe Herd said. “We are not aiming for an AI-driven experience. Bee is simply the intelligence under the hood.”
That caution reflects what the apps are up against with their youngest users. “Gen Z wants authenticity more than anything right now,” Sharabi said.
Whether fewer and better pays
Hinge, which has long deemphasized swiping in favor of prompts and conversation, grew direct revenue 22% to $203.5 million last quarter, according to second-quarter results from parent company Match Group, which also owns Tinder. Paying users rose 17% and monthly active users increased 13%. Match expects Hinge to reach $1 billion in annual revenue in 2027.
Tinder’s direct revenue slipped 1% to $457.5 million over the same period, the company reported, though its daily active user decline narrowed to 4%. Rascoff called that Tinder’s best performance on the metric in 10 quarters on the company’s Aug. 4 earnings call.
Bumble is further from that outcome. Second-quarter revenue fell 15.2% to $210.5 million and paying users dropped 16.4% to 3.2 million, the company reported, while its guidance calls for third-quarter revenue of $205 million to $213 million, another double-digit decline.
Coduto’s read is Hinge reached some of the territory Bumble is now pursuing years ago.
“I think Hinge delivered on more of the promises that Bumble made,” she said.
That is the risk in Wolfe Herd’s timeline. Bumble has announced the strategy and removed the feature that once distinguished it. But the product meant to embody its new approach won’t arrive until early 2027, a delay she attributed to a holdup in the company’s platform overhaul, while revenue declines and competitors pursue their own versions of the same shift.
Dating apps already solved how to expand the pool, Sharabi said. Narrowing it is what’s left.
“That’s the million-dollar question,” she said.
Bumble did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
