Searching

Bumble has unveiled the newest feature of its dating app, removing the requirement for women to make the first move with their matches. The app’s new CEO Lidiane Jones said that this is part of a larger relaunch of the app.

Until now, Bumble has required women to send the first message to a potential match, keeping them in control of who they want to communicate with. Now, the dating app has jettisoned its requirement to automate the process with the launch of “Opening Moves,” which lets female users choose from a list of prompts where matches can reply and start a conversation themselves. (Women can also create their own prompts.)

For same-gender and non-binary users, they can either set or respond to an Opening Move.

Tinder and Hinge announced new features to ramp up safety for their users, including sharing date details with family and friends and filtering unwanted language from comments and messages.

Tinder’s new safety feature Share My Date allows users to share date plans they make with their family and friends for additional safety, including details like location, date and time along with their match's photo. They can do this using the feature up to 30 days in advance, according to USA Today.

While Tinder says about 30 percent of its users already share this information with close friends or family, it makes it much more convenient and top-of-mind to be able to share via the app.

A new study has found that when dating app users can share disappearing photos with other users, it can increase matches and user engagement.

According to Phys.org, researchers found that enabling people to share photos that would disappear within a certain timeframe helped them overcome fears related to privacy and helped with conversation starters. Many dating app users are not willing to share personal details about themselves when they meet new people on dating apps, making it more difficult to connect and have deeper conversations, according to the study.

The large-scale randomized field experiment was conducted with more than 70,000 users of a China-based dating app. The experiment featured both a control group where subjects uploaded a photo that would stay posted, like in traditional dating app profiles, and a treatment group where users could upload ephemeral photos. They found that users in the treatment group sent more personal photos compared with the control group.

YouApp Homepage Snapshot

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.

Grindr has hired the two founders of Athena, a fitness community app, to join its team.

According to Axios, the gay dating app company hired Athena co-founder and CEO AJ Wolf as a senior manager of product finance, while co-founder and technology chief Max Roche is joining as a senior iOS engineer.

Axios noted that Grindr did not acquire any of Athena’s assets.

There is not much detail about the hirings, but Grindr has been looking into areas outside of dating to build community on its platform. One area Grindr CEO George Arison has focused on is travel. The company recently released a feature called Teleport to allow users to set their location to a place they plan to travel so they can connect with others before they arrive. Tinder has a similar feature called Passport.

Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones sat down with Tech Crunch to discuss women on the platform no longer making the first move, potential new safety features, AI, and other plans to enhance the app.

In a recent interview Jones shared that she is reconsidering the basic premise of Bumble: that women make the first move. Instead, she said that women should be given the choice of whether they want to make the first move or not, giving them more control in their dating experience.

Jones assured Tech Crunch that her goal of empowering women on the platform remains steadfast: “Our brand awareness is so high, it’s amazing. And if you ask anybody about Bumble, they’ll say it’s about women, and the core of that is not changing. We are a company that really cares about women’s empowerment.”