Features

Image: Hinge

Match Group announced in its first quarter earnings report that Tinder’s paying users were down for the sixth quarter in a row, but Hinge’s paying users continue to rise.

According to Tech Crunch, Hinge has seen a whopping 31 percent increase in paying users year over year, now up to 1.4 million. This is far less than Tinder’s 10 million paying users, but as Tinder continues on its downward trend, its paying users dropping 9 percent from this time last year, Hinge offers a beacon of hope.

Dating apps in general have struggled in the last year, and companies like Match Group and Bumble have been trying to address it with more exciting paid features and additional security protocols, like Verification on Tinder. However, dating app users continue to drop their subscriptions and opt not to pay for features, especially younger users who are turning to free platforms like social media apps to connect.

Founder and former CEO of Bumble Whitney Wolfe Herd told audiences at the Bloomberg Technology Summit that dating apps should lean heavily into AI, including chatbots that can advise users and even go on dates for them.

Herd, who stepped down last year, noted that Bumble will use AI "to help create more healthy and equitable" dating experience, according to Gizmodo.

“You could, in the near future, be talking to your AI dating concierge. You could share your insecurities,” Wolfe Herd said on stage at the Summit, according to Gizmodo. “There is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges.”

Image: photoroom

OkCupid and AI-powered app Photoroom have partnered to introduce a new tool that helps erase your ex from your best photos.

According to OkCupid’s press release, the “Ex-Terminator” is a new feature designed to help users digitally remove their exes from photos they want to post on the dating app. Using AI technology, Photoroom seamlessly edits out unwanted people, giving OkCupid users a chance to update their profiles with new solo lifestyle.

Interested people can go to Photoroom’s website and see the promotional page with OkCupid, dubbed “Erase Your Ex.” From there, you can drop an image and Photoroom will erase your ex and deliver your photo back to upload to OkCupid. (There’s also a link to join the dating app from the site if you’re not already a member.)

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.

Dating app Grindr has been sued in the U.K. for allegedly selling the HIV status of its users to third parties.

According to the BBC, the claim was filed in London’s High Court, and alleges that “covert tracking technology” was used to track and illegally share the personal health status of users with advertisers. More than 650 claimants were affected along with reportedly thousands of other U.K. users.

Sharing personal and sensitive data of users with third parties without their consent is illegal in the U.K.

The lawsuit says the information shared with third parties includes the ethnicities and sexual orientations of users. It also says the sharing of such information took place primarily before April 2018, though some data was shared as recently as April 2020. The lawsuit specifically names two companies which help app developers analyze user engagement, Apptimize and Localytics, as involved third parties with access to the data. The lawsuit also claims that these outside firms might have retained some of the sensitive data for their own purposes.