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Dating apps aren’t delivering when it comes to finding a life partner.
Single people are getting sick of swiping and abandoning dating apps in droves. That’s left the apps themselves desperately attempting to pivot amidst public backlash against their business premise — to the point of turning their backs on what made them successful in the first place.
Tinder, which made billions on the idea that people want to meet one another easily online, has taken to hosting in-person events. Bumble, which just made a deal to go private after years of its stock price tanking, has turned its back on its feminist mission, which used to require women to make the first move.
They’re trying anything to keep public trust, despite the fact three-quarters of Americans now believe dating apps have made romance feel transactional, per a 2026 Harris poll.
“[The apps] took the friction out of finding someone, but they also took the friction out of exiting, which means that you weren’t getting the depth of the experience,” Boston University business professor Marshall Van Alstyne told The Post.
“Initially, they were creating a lot of value to get folks on board [lots of people to potentially date], but now they’ve entered the extractive phase [charging subscription fees], and I think we’re now seeing the consequences.”
Business is looking pretty grim. Match Group, which owns Tinder, Match.com, OkCupid, and many other platforms, laid off 13% of their workforce last year, and Bumble 30% last June.
Bumble once had 12.5 million users who spent an average of 100 minutes a day swiping, but the app’s paying users fell by almost 17% year-over-year, and revenue dropped 15% during the same period.
Since going public in 2021, Bumble has lost 90% of its market value. The struggling app made a deal last Tuesday to go private for $1.3 billion — chump change compared with its $14 billion valuation at its initial public offering.
To New York City matchmaker Maria Avgitidis, part of the problem was going public in the first place — shifting obligations away from hooking users up to line shareholder pockets: “[The apps] had to find the equilibrium between providing a good product and also providing positive returns to their shareholders. And sometimes those things are not going to align.”
When Bumble was founded in 2014, it positioned itself as a feminist alternative to Tinder, led by a female CEO who put women in control by requiring them to send a message to their matches first.
As of August, the app had turned its back on that fundamental premise, and now anyone can send the first message — making it virtually indistinguishable from competitors.
Even the female founder and CEO herself, Whitney Wolfe Herd, is stepping aside to make room for two incoming male CEOs upon going private. Bumble did not respond to request for comment.
Amy Andersen, the self-described matchmaker of Silicon Valley, believes the apps’ contraction is part of a larger disillusionment with the idea that romance could be made simpler by algorithms.
She told The Post she’s noticed a “huge exodus from the apps” that’s escalated in the last three years — even among the techies who literally founded them.
“I have had clients literally be the ones who have built the app, but they’re not using it when it comes to their own personal lives,” she said. “The machine professionally dominates their lives, yet when it comes to the intricacies of their personal lives, they’re choosing the human.”
Another app trying to reinvent itself is Tinder, which has seen monthly active users decline 7% year-over-year as of March and whose parent company Match Group is increasing Tinder’s marketing budget by $50 million this year.
After almost fifteen years in the business of matching people seamlessly online through a swipe, they’re moving into the events space and offering users in-person gatherings on a new tab in the app. Tinder told The Post that they’ve facilitated over 1,700 events so far and hope to reach 75 cities by the end of the year.
They seem to have reached an unlikely conclusion: that staying alive in the online dating space might require recreating the sort of social scenarios apps were originally aiming to replace.
Tinder has also tried to get people together in groups, rather than on one-on-one dates. They launched “double date mode” in 2025, and last month added group hangouts to their offerings. “We’re building ways to lower the pressure on Tinder,” a spokesperson told The Post.
“Ultimately, our goal is to make finding a spark feel more fun, authentic and connected to real life.”
The move comes as singles are flocking to more old school methods of finding partners. They’re joining running clubs and pickleball leagues in hopes of finding the one, and setting up their friends with potential matches. Meanwhile, in-person singles events hosted on Eventbrite literally doubled between 2022 and 2025.
Disillusioned singles are also trying out good old-fashioned matchmaking — tasking a human, rather than an algorithm, with finding them love. Chris Kumar, CEO of the country’s largest online matchmaking service Tawkify, said his platform has grown 30% year-over-year.
The upswing, he says, is part of a larger story of “dating app fatigue” and singles desperately looking for a more substantive alternative.
“The apps lost the elegance of what it means to be online and have that spark of connection with someone who swipes on you. That just isn’t exciting anymore,” he said. “So [the apps are trying] to find ways to reinvigorate that hope and that excitement from singles.”
The whole transformation seems to point to an uncomfortable conclusion: the future of dating apps may be one where the apps themselves take the back seat, and let singles find one another on their own terms. Its the clearest proof yet that Cupid’s mysterious ways can’t be distilled into an algorthim and true love remains as unpredictable and sometimes elusive as ever.
