Dating apps are supposed to make money and help people find love. Are they doing neither?

Zohran Mamdani may be the exception that proves the rule. “I think I was in love from the moment I saw her profile,” the New York mayor said of his wife, Rama Duwaji, in an interview with Complex magazine. “I screenshotted her Hinge profile.”

But for every Mamdani-Duwaji love story there are countless complaints and despairing headlines about dating apps (‘ding-dong, dating apps are dead’, ‘why young adults are caught in a dating recession’, ‘I feel so cringe on dating apps’), taking aim at their habit of locking away desirable profiles, making users feel unwanted, or providing an overwhelming sense of infinite potential mates.

“They have an economic incentive to stop you partnering in long-term committed relationships,” says Alistair Kitchen, an Australian writer who has developed an alternative dating app that is in an early test period. “What I tell people is this: every time a Hinge user falls in love on Hinge, Hinge loses two customers, and so the worst thing possible for Hinge is for people to fall in love.”

So, Kitchen argues, mainstream Western dating apps like Hinge, Bumble and Tinder have an incentive to keep users online and spending money to overcome the limitations they have placed in users’ way. Yet if commercial needs are frustrating dating apps’ social potential, the business side is scarcely going better. Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge among other brands, has suffered repeated falls in its user base. Bumble, which shot to a $US14 billion ($20 billion) valuation after it went public in 2021, has done even worse. After sharp declines in the company’s revenue and users, this week a private equity group bought it for $US1.3 billion , or about a tenth of what it had been worth (and yet much more than the $US350 million it had been trading around before the buyout became public).

The two men who run buyout group Ithaca Holdings, Ravi Gupta and John Hegeman, will become Bumble’s co-chief executives and confront the defining problem facing the dating app business: how to turn around a sector that is supposed to make money and help people find love but is trending towards doing neither.

To date, the dating apps have relied on product changes to entice users to give them another shot. In January, Bumble’s founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returned to lead the company. “I love Oprah and … I had been doing her exercise of ‘don’t tell the universe what you want; tell the universe to use you [for] what it needs from you’,” Wolfe Herd told The New York Times . She decided that the universe should use her for “love and light”, prompting her to accept a return to run Bumble.

In June she laid off 30 per cent of Bumble’s staff. Then, in August, the company – which was contacted for comment – nixed its signature feature, which had required women to send the first message as a step to help them lead the conversation. It was not enough. The investment bank UBS told clients in an August note seen by this masthead that Bumble’s revenue had fallen from about $US1 billion in 2023 to an estimated $US833 million this year, with no recovery forecast by 2030.