Why dating apps are ditching the swipe: blame Gen Z

Two of the biggest dating apps in the United States — Bumble and Tinder, the latter owned by Match Group alongside Hinge — are rethinking the very feature that made them household names. In an August 5 earnings call, Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd announced that the company is shifting away from "optimizing for swipe speed and intensity" toward an approach built around "fewer, higher-quality matches."

This rethink comes as the industry's core metrics keep sliding: Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, closed the second quarter with 13.3 million paying users, down 6 percent from a year earlier. For more than a decade, dating apps built their strategy around volume — more profiles, more matches, more messages — on the theory that more choice would eventually translate into more dates.

The main force behind this shift is Gen Z — the generation born in the early 2000s and after. Unlike millennials and Gen X, they came of age with dating apps already a fact of life, but researchers say they're increasingly worn down by endless options and half-hearted conversations. As Katherine Koduto, an assistant professor of media studies at Boston University, puts it: "When you open the app, they want you to keep swiping — that's how they hold your attention."

Liesel Sharabi, director of Arizona State University's Relationships and Technology Lab, says the whole system has turned into "a numbers game that prioritizes quantity over quality." In her view, if matching algorithms were truly as powerful as advertised, users wouldn't need to scroll through hundreds of profiles — a solid match could just as easily turn up among the first five candidates.

Still, this doesn't mean Gen Z is abandoning dating apps altogether — Koduto notes that young users remain the most active group on these platforms, which have become deeply woven into how their generation approaches relationships. As Sharabi puts it: "For them, dating culture is essentially dating-app culture."