Asian Dating Apps Revamp Strategies to Attract Tinder and Bumble Users

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Two dating apps based in Asia have changed their platforms to entice women - and intend to take market share away from popular dating apps like Tinder and Bumble.

According to South China Morning Post, dating platform YouApp recently underwent a major revamp. The app now uses AI to create personality tests targeting specific demographics and cultures within its userbase, to correct a longstanding problem: men outnumber women on these platforms.

In fact, Pew Research found based on a survey conducted in 2022, 54 percent of women in the U.S. felt overwhelmed by messages on dating apps compared to 64 percent of men who said they felt the opposite.

YouApp’s revamp puts the focus on personality tests, which encompass popular Eastern and Western measures for compatibility. According to South China Morning Post, the tests include generating horoscopes, Myers-Briggs Type Indicators, and BaZi, an ancient Chinese fortune-telling approach that is linked to the time and location of a user’s birth, much like horoscopes.

When there is a match, YouApp generates a compatibility score for each person based on their test results.

China-based app DayOne is also appealing to single women by focusing on meeting in person rather than texting endlessly. (Their tagline is “meet more, text less.”) DayOne doesn’t allow its users to chat with each other before confirming a date in real life. The app starts off with questions to its users about preferred dating activities, and from there suggests venues, according to South China Morning Post.

DayOne hopes to collaborate with local restaurants and bars to launch member perks like special drinks menus. It is based in Hong Kong and currently only operates there, but plans to launch in Macau this year.

The revamp for YouApp so far has been successful. Among YouApp’s 20,000 active users, 62 percent are women. The largest markets are in Singapore and Malaysia, followed by the U.S., greater China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan), Mexico, and Spain. DayOne is much smaller, and has a ratio of two-thirds men to one-third women, though its aim is to correct this.

This comes at a time when Match Group and Bumble are losing subscribers and downloads on their platforms and are starting to put coveted features behind paywalls to generate more revenue. Dating app users however, haven’t been so willing to pay for these features, so they are leaving dating apps for places like LinkedIn, Instagram and fitness apps.

This might not bode well for apps like YouApp and DayOne, if Gen Z daters aren’t willing to purchase dating app subscriptions. DayOne’s revenue strategy is different from traditional dating apps in that the more real-world dates it facilitates, the more referrals it drives to venues, which means the majority of its revenue isn’t coming directly from users.