Match Group

There’s no love lost between dating app rivals Tinder and Bumble. Shortly after it was revealed that Tinder will enable a Bumble-style ladies-first messaging feature in a future update, news has broken that Tinder is suing Bumble for patent infringement.

Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg divulged Tinder’s patent acquisition in a Q4 earnings call last month.

“On the product front, Tinder has been on the cutting edge of innovation since its inception in 2012, inventing the swipe gesture, which has since become this cultural phenomenon of 'swipe right' and 'swipe left' and that is often imitated on mobile products,” she said.

Blockchain technology has become a buzzword these days, thanks to the soaring popularity of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Now, new dating app companies are incorporating the same blockchain technology into their matching and verification processes to compete with big-name brands like Tinder.

There is a growing need for dating apps to address a persistent problem in online dating: lying and misrepresentation in dating profiles. Most dating apps use social media accounts as a way of verifying profiles, but this hasn’t curbed the proliferation of fake accounts and scammers. Blockchain technology is based in a democratic oversight of users, by users, to improve the overall experience.

Tinder changed the game for online dating, creating a mainstream acceptance of looking for love by swiping over a phone. A large part of the app’s success was gameifying the online dating process – look at a picture, and swipe left or right depending on whether or not you were interested. It was possible to go through dozens of profiles in seconds, making the swiping process more fun than pouring over dating profiles.

Tinder is taking a cue from one of its main rivals. According to a report from MarketWatch, a future update will introduce the ability for female users to decide whether they want to initiate all conversations with future matches.

The ladies-message-first arrangement was made famous by Bumble, which was launched by Tinder co-founder Whitney Wolfe Herd following her acrimonious departure from the company. Unlike its rival, however, Tinder will not make ladies-first messaging the default; instead, any user who wishes to opt in can enable the feature in their settings.

“Often, women don’t really want the pressure of kicking off the conversation, but if they want it, that’s great,” Match Group Chief Executive Mandy Ginsberg told MarketWatch. “Giving people the choice versus telling people how to engage is the big difference.”

Emojis have come a long way since they first invaded our phones with their colorful cartoon depictions of food, faces, furry creatures, and other now-iconic symbols. Updates have given us mythical creatures, a hand taking a selfie, and a much-hyped avocado.

The most important change by far came in 2015, when an Apple update made emojis available for a diverse range of skin tones and same-sex couples for the first time. It was progress, but for a group of advocates that includes Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and Emojination founder Jennifer 8. Lee, it wasn’t progress enough.

They have joined forces with Tinder to launch a campaign to petition the Unicode Consortium to introduce interracial couple emoji. Currently, the emoji featuring couples only show people of the same race. Under the new proposal, 21 different combinations of gender and race would be possible.

Dating apps happily boast about their sign-up rates or the number of marriages they’ve created, but they’re understandably reluctant to release less flattering figures. How many users actually stick with an app once they’ve created a profile? How many let their account lapse, or delete the app altogether? Which apps are most quickly abandoned?

In pursuit of more juicy data, mobile data company Ogury sampled more than six million mobile user profiles from its network to take a deep dive into usage habits around the world. They focused on users in the US, UK, France, Italy, and Spain who had used dating apps within the six months between January and June 2017. To present the most balanced findings, they were were careful to maintain an identical male to female ratio in each region.

Ogury’s results reveal a landscape that may surprise online dating’s biggest advocates. One chart in the report shows that dating app longevity leaves something to be desired, with most app uninstalls occuring within the first day of usage. Zoosk users, at 44.1%, are most likely to uninstall in less than 24 hours, followed by Grindr at 33.6% and Tinder at 32.9%.

Match Group has a new CEO, and she’s determined to provide a better online dating experience for women. In a recent interview with Marketwatch, Mandy Ginsberg revealed that Tinder will be debuting a new feature that lets women choose whether or not they want to make the first move. She has female-friendly plans for their other properties as well, including Match and OkCupid.

Tinder’s new feature competes directly with dating app Bumble, which has seen incredible growth since its debut. Bumble differs slightly in that women automatically get to make the first move, rather than choosing.

Ginsberg has also launched a new campaign for OkCupid that “emphasizes shared hobbies over hookups.”