Bumble Inc

It wasn’t long ago that dating services were seen as the last refuge of the lovelorn and desperate. Today online dating hasn’t merely shed its stigma, it’s a bona fide phenomenon and business appears to be booming.

According to a report from IBISWorld, annual revenue in the online dating industry has surpassed $3 billion. Dating services employed over 9,000 people worldwide in 2017 and have collectively seen an annual growth rate of +5.3% over the past five years.

Yet hardly a week goes by without someone publishing an article condemning digital dating for butchering our ability to have real relationships, and even major players like Match Group have fallen short of analysts’ expectations.

Huggle Marketing Team

Image: BusinessCloud

While Bumble battles Match Group over intellectual property, another women-led dating app is celebrating a more positive 2018. Huggle, a British friendship and dating service launched in 2016, and its all-female marketing team has been acquired by Badoo.

Huggle matches users based on the places they love to visit. Simply indicate what you’re looking for – a date or a friend – and your search preferences, including your ideal age range and how many places you must have in common. Huggle uses GPS to automatically check you into locations you visit and notifies you of profiles that share your interests.

Founders Stina Sanders and Valerie Stark believe this approach to dating offers a more effective way to assess compatibility.

Bumble has filed a $400 million lawsuit against Match Group, the parent company of popular dating apps such as Tinder, OkCupid, and Match. Bumble accused Match Group of interfering with its business operations, including stealing trade secrets and hurting the company’s chance to sell equity investments, according to reports from CNN Tech and Recode.

The Bumble lawsuit follows a previous lawsuit filed by Match Group against Bumble two weeks prior. Match Group accused the female-friendly dating app of patent infringement, specifically in regard to its swiping technology, stating that it is virtually identical to Tinder.

Bumble initially responded to the lawsuit with a post on its website, stating: “We swipe left on your attempted scare tactics, and on these endless games. We swipe left on your assumption that a baseless lawsuit would intimidate us. Given your enduring interest in our company, we expected you to know us a bit better by now.”

Facebook has come under fire, with many longtime users debating whether or not to delete their accounts, rather than make their personal information vulnerable to third parties. But something you might not have considered, brought to light by a reporter from Mashable, is how deleting Facebook might affect your love life.

Many dating apps rely on Facebook to verify profile information – that is, to make sure you really are a person and not a bot or an advertisement. With this in mind, many apps require that you use your Facebook account to login, including Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and other really popular apps.

Research firm Cambridge Analytica was accused of hijacking data from 50 million Facebook users and using the data to influence the 2016 U.S. election. This information breach was made possible because Facebook relies on third parties for ad revenue, and also partners with research firms like Cambridge Analytica, which leaves its platform open to security problems. Facebook maintains it didn’t know about the information grab, though evidence has come to light via whistleblower Christopher Wylie, who developed the strategy for hijacking and using the data to create targeted political profiles of Americans.

The relationship between Bumble and Tinder took a toxic turn last month when Match Group, Tinder’s parent company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against its female-friendly competitor.

The suit, filed in Texas on March 16, accuses Bumble of copying key elements of Tinder’s functionality and alleges that trade secrets were stolen by Bumble employees who previously worked at Tinder. Whitney Wolfe Herd, Bumble’s founder and CEO, was herself a Tinder executive before filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against the company in 2014 and leaving to start her own venture.

Herd was initially silent when news of the Match Group lawsuit broke, but has since responded in grand, defiant fashion with a full page ad in the New York Times as well on their blog.

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.