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. Wolfe Herd will step down as chief executive when the buyout goes through, but keep working with the company.

Match Group’s Hinge has been performing far better than Bumble, with strong user growth globally. Yet its larger Tinder business, which was the original app-based dating platform, has been deep in the doldrums for years. In response, the company launched Project Aurora this year. It came with features like double dating (“The group chat? On fire. The banter? Elite. Small talk? Doesn’t stand a chance,” intones one ad), star sign checks and AI tools. Match, which was contacted for comment, selected Australia as the first market. Early signs have been encouraging. There has been “steady progress on turning the ship”, investment bank Barclays told its clients in August. The rate at which Tinder’s user base was shrinking was slower, it noted. The share price has risen accordingly but remains far below where it was five years ago.

University of Sydney lecturer Dr Sam Chan, an expert on dating apps, is unconvinced that new features will make a durable difference. “They’re coming up with gimmicks,” he says. “How many people want to double-date?” Chan says dating apps are now competing for attention in a wider world of “emotional support” entertainment. AI companions and treacly sweet Netflix romances now vie for time that may have once been spent on an app, to say nothing of pornography or erotica. Still, for all the gloomy headlines, dating apps are still a vital way for Australians to partner up. The nationally representative Australian Study of Health and Relationships survey found that in 2022-23, more than half of people aged 20 to 39 had found their most recent partner online.

Kitchen, the Melburnian writer who is launching a dating app called One, says his product is distinct from those that came before. Users create a profile and then speak to an AI matchmaker about their goals and lifestyle for about 10 minutes. Then they get three matches a day, select one, and can only communicate via voice notes. There is no infinite scroll of potential matches or endless texting of no substance. For now the app is free but eventually there will be a one-off fee to join, Kitchen says. The other crucial difference: AI allowed Kitchen to build the app himself. “It’s not yet clear to me if one ever needs to employ more than five people [to run a dating app],” he says. “The world has changed drastically in the last 12 months.”

Without public shareholders or ambitious venture capitalists to satisfy – though he does not rule out the prospect one day – Kitchen says he has no incentive to “enshittify” his app. In fact, assisting another writer on a book about how much of the internet was getting worse was what spurred Kitchen to develop One. “I’m a writer, I’m not a tech bro, or at least not until very recently,” he says.

Sydneysider Charlotte Vieira has taken a different approach to the dating app she co-founded, Humpday. Originally launched in 2024 after a trial year running in-person events, the app unlocked once a week on Wednesday (hence the name). “That initial model didn’t work,” Vieira says. Users weren’t sticking around. So she and her co-founder Kara Zervides went back to in-person events such as padel ball nights.

“We’ve found activity events work well,” Vieira says. About 60 people is the sweet spot, big enough that there are plenty of options and “intimate enough that you’re having a bunch of first dates”.

“People don’t want to feel like they’re going to a speed-dating singles event, they want to go somewhere they’d already go and meet someone.”

There are other companies in a similar space, too, such as Crush Club in Melbourne and Thursday in Sydney. Like Kitchen, Vieira and Zervides are relaunching their app in a test phase as a closed group, which will have a subscription model. Making people pay will lead them to be more invested in going on actual dates, Vieira hopes.

For now, both Humpday and One are minnows at their earliest stages. To become viable businesses they will need to get to a scale where people know there is a good chance they can meet someone desirable on the sites.

There are, of course, apps where the business model already aligns more directly with users’ desires. Chan, the University of Sydney expert, notes that the gay hook-up site Grindr and the sex-positive app Feeld are in that category. “The need is perpetual [but] not in a bad way,” he says. “After people have sex or satisfy their need, they want to have sex again in a week.” But Chan sees another model for commercially successful dating sites, one more similar to the Australian hopefuls: China’s marriage websites that charge a flat upfront fee to help singles find a partner. Some, though, have taken that model and built other businesses atop it. One, Momo, mixes a dating site with livestreaming, where lonely people can while away their hours waiting for a match. “The entertainment function is a profit centre,” Chan says.

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.