Bumble Tried to Change Dating, but the Dating Market Forced It to Change Instead

Not even 24 hours after dating app Bumble announced it was getting rid of its trademark feature that requires women to make the first move, Robin H.’s inbox was already attracting unwanted attention. “This guy responded to my prompt, and he wasn’t a person I would have swiped on. I can’t believe some of these men think we’re a match,” the 53-year-old social worker in Orlando, Florida, tells WIRED. “Men will swipe on anybody and see what sticks. And with this change, they are just going to be reaching out to everybody.” (Citing privacy concerns, Robin asked that WIRED not publish her full last name.) Bumble, which hit the market in December 2014, staked its brand on challenging traditional heterosexual dating dynamics. “Whitney Wolfe Is Bringing Feminism to Your Phone,” an Austin Woman headline exclaimed less than two years after launch. But the app’s sudden reversal last week suggests its women-first positioning has become a liability to the company’s sustainability. Bumble’s policy update—which includes giving matches 72 hours to respond; previously it was 24—comes as Big Dating’s growth is lagging. Perhaps hinting at what was to come, in May, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe-Herd said in an interview with Axios that niche apps aren’t built for real longevity. The dilemma is emblematic of the volatility in the current dating market, where declining engagement and the introduction of AI are forcing companies to rethink how they should best appeal to singles. These problems aren’t unique to Bumble. Match Group’s August 2026 results showed Tinder’s number of daily active users is down 4 percent from the previous year, while Hinge’s global monthly active users rose 13 percent during the same period. But even apps with sustained engagement struggle with brand perception issues. Feeld, a niche kink app that championed polyamory and BDSM in its early days, has shifted its focus to attracting more vanilla users, resulting in a 200 percent spike in users in 2025, though people have described the new vibe as “normie hell.” Likewise, Grindr has positioned itself as more than an app for hookups, expanding into a “gayborhood” that offers luxury travel experiences, medical prescriptions for GLP-1s and erectile dysfunction pills, musical artist activations, and AI matchmaking. To turn a profit, Grindr has essentially transformed into a digital gated community that now charges members $500 to hook up through its newest membership tier, Edge, while users who opt out are forced to navigate a platform drowning in ads and bots. Bumble, which is privately owned and reportedly exploring a sale, has taken a similar route: transforming a once-niche product into a for-everybody service that pay-gates basic features. The move has not settled well with users online, who have renamed it “Yellow Tinder”—a reference to the color of its logo—and complained that the changes will encourage harassment. “I’m not going to use an app that makes me feel like prey,” one user wrote on X. “The change obviously goes against their whole thing,” says Emily Spence, a 28-year-old events producer in New York City who has used Bumble since 2015. “But the requirement for women to message first didn’t really prevent creeps from messaging you. Just because you say ‘hey’ first doesn’t mean a man isn’t gonna send you something crazy after. It was kind of like a false sense of protection.” The new update may also reflect a desire for a return to more traditional courtship roles. In the announcement, the company noted that 66 percent of women surveyed on Bumble said they prefer men to send the first message, adding that it alleviates unnecessary pressure from the experience. The company said that its testing of the new feature showed increased chat initiation, but it’s unclear if that will actually translate to more dates and higher user retention or just more unwanted messages. Bumble did not respond to a request for comment. Stefanie Feldman, 41, appreciates the new direction of the app. “I like that it takes off the pressure. Sometimes I just want the men to do the work,” says the business manager in Los Angeles. “I’ve never considered myself a feminist. I want to be pursued. And just because someone reaches out to you doesn’t mean you have to say anything. So that is a feminine power in itself, learning to say no.” Even before last week’s news, Bumble’s brand dilution seems to have been in the works for a while. In 2024, Bumble began tweaking its founding principle when it debuted the feature Opening Moves, which let men reply to a prompt on a user’s page. According to data the market intelligence firm Sensor Tower shared with WIRED, the app has also not featured its women-first social mission as part of its marketing in the US since 2023, with only a few limited branding spots reinforcing that women make the first move in 2022. As an alternative, Bumble “created more generic messaging on how the app has been successful for previous users and encouraged potential users to ‘get to know new people today,’” says Kara Lee, a senior analyst with the firm. The reversal ultimately highlights the difficulty of building a dating app around a social mission and how the cost of doing business sometimes requires you to abandon your original ideals. Riki Thompson, an associate professor of digital rhetoric at the University of Washington Tacoma who published a study on the app last year, adds that the shift away from mandatory first moves was the only way, in the interim, for Bumble to keep pace with its rivals. “An app is only one small part of a much larger system, how people actually behave, what they expect from dating, and the norms they bring with them. You can design an app with great intentions, but you can’t fully control how people use it,” Thompson says in an email. “Bumble is still a business. It has to stay competitive and profitable in a marketplace where plenty of competitors aren’t built around any social mission at all.” Comments Back to top