Bumble was supposed to be different. When it launched in 2014, it offered women a simple proposition: if you matched with a man, you had to make the first move. The rule was meant to make online dating safer and less intimidating, while giving women control over who got to speak first.
This week, Bumble abandoned it.
The change follows the introduction of Opening Moves, which had already softened the original rule, and comes as Bumble prepares to abandon another defining feature: the swipe.
The company says it is responding to changing user behaviour and wants to encourage more meaningful connections.
But there is another way of reading the changes.
Bumble was created to fix what many saw as Tinder’s chaotic and aggressive hookup culture by shifting the power dynamic entirely to women. Now it is dismantling those features. And it is not alone. Across the dating-app industry, the swipe-and-match model that transformed how people met is being quietly reworked while companies race to put artificial intelligence at the centre of whatever comes next.
“Bumble is in salvage mode,” says Luke Brunning, a philosopher who studies the ethics of technology and relationships. “They’ve already reorganised, restructured and cut jobs in response to declining revenue. This risky, standout pivot suggests they’re wondering how, despite all that, to keep going.”
The number of Bumble’s paying users fell sharply over the past year and its share price has been under sustained pressure. The company cut about 30% of its workforce this year.
“It’s going to be fascinating to see whether they can weather it,” Brunning says. “But they’re not alone: a lot of the major players are also in salvage mode, trying to figure out how to position themselves in a market that is increasingly fed up with them.”
Brunning’s research shows dating apps are now often used grudgingly, because people feel that they are necessary, rather than with the excitement that accompanied their rise.
The online dating industry, estimated to be worth almost £10bn globally, is keenly aware of this. Its solution? To go full AI.
Grindr – seen as a testbed for the wider industry – is transitioning into an “AI-first” platform. Tinder is testing Chemistry, an AI-powered system intended to reduce “swipe fatigue”. Bumble has been developing an AI matchmaking assistant called Bee.
Other startups are dispensing with swiping altogether. London-based Fate describes itself as an “agentic AI dating app”: instead of browsing profiles, users are interviewed by an AI about what they want from relationships to find similarities with potential partners.
So why aren’t we talking about being on the brink of a brave new world of dating apps, where AI will successfully sift the candidates to find our one true love? Why, instead, is the debate about whether the apps will even survive?
Adam Peacock, a researcher of technology and intimacy, thinks the issue is that the industry is misreading what people are objecting to.
“There’s a kind of emerging cultural backlash against allowing AI into our intimate lives as well as the additional concern that someone you’re talking to on these apps, is actually filtering the whole conversation through an AI concierge,” he says.
Peacock says gen Z in particular are concerned as to whether dating apps are even being designed to make good connections between users but are, instead, opaquely tweaked to monetise the time users spend on the site. That, in a cynical twist, the apps are deliberately profiting from keeping people lonely.
“The dating industry has turned intimacy into an enormous source of data,” Peacock says. “Dating apps can know where people live, what they look like, who they are attracted to, what they say to potential partners and, increasingly, how they behave.”
Elsa Kugelberg, a philosopher who researches gender and relationships, says online dating has become too embedded in modern life to fail. But the first generation of dating apps – the era of the profile, the swipe, the match and the message – may be reaching its end.
Peacock thinks the apps may evolve into something broader: “More of a social media, lifestyle product than a dedicated dating app.”
But the question is whether any iteration of dating app will make the experience better, or whether the extra layers of AI will simply function as a temporary facade on an exhausted model.
Brunning believes AI on dating apps doesn’t have to be like this. “There can be ways of trying to do digital better, that doesn’t involve giving people AI tools to talk to each other with,” he says.
Better moderation, clearer policies, better ways of presenting yourself and more control over how the environment works could all improve online dating without handing more of it to machines, he says.
The critical point is this, he says: “You can’t just take a product that’s out of favour, put AI on top of it and say: ‘OK, now we have a product that works.’”
