In her 2012 book, Addiction by Design, anthropologist Natasha Dow Schüll lays out the different technological mechanisms casinos employ to keep people gambling. From the architecture of buildings and placement of ATMs to the design of casino carpets—all of it exemplifies strategic calculation. As a blurb for a gambling trade show once put it, the various elements making up the modern gambling experience are “symphonies of individual technologies” that come together to “create a single experience,” calibrated in a way to keep people playing, to maximize “time on device.”
Sound familiar? Schüll thinks so. “There’s something very similar about the mechanisms that are built into dating apps, especially with swiping,” she says. “Swiping left and right—it’s almost like a horizontal slot machine. You really don’t know what you’re going to get.”
Although Schüll doesn’t think these similarities are limited to just dating apps (she mentions the stock-trading app Robinhood), she does believe they all share one thing in common: strategies to hold users in place and reduce friction. So what does it mean then when friction enters the picture? When users spend less time in the “hold” and less energy on the machine?
It’s true that the amount of time spent on dating apps has declined over the years. A recent Forbes poll of dating app users showed that, on average, they spend about 51 minutes per day on them. Ten years ago they were devoting 100 minutes daily to platforms like Bumble.
It’s also true that the growth of paying users has slowed down of late, accompanied by a slight dip in the number of Americans who say they use dating apps. However, one app in particular is down much more than any other—Tinder, creator of the swipe. Though Tinder still holds the title for most commonly used dating app, its overall downloads have been dropping since 2020, while downloads of apps like Bumble and Hinge have continuously increased since 2021. Tinder has also seen a reduction in its paying users over the past two years, while its monthly active user numbers have dipped in the past three quarters.
Explanations for this decline are as numerous as the number of dating apps on the market. “It could be some wearing off of the novelty effect, it could be disappointment, it could be that there’s other activities that are taking their time, like sports gambling, it could be exhaustion,” says Schüll.
To her last point, dating app fatigue is a real thing. That same Forbes poll showed that 80 percent of millennial users—the group that utilizes these apps the most—reported feeling worn out.
Another cause attributed to this decline is the dating app exodus, which occurred after a spike in usage during the pandemic, as many young users are now seeking more “real-world” connections. And of course there’s that age-old tedium: boredom.
“In design, they’re constantly upping the ante—if there’s a video poker machine, then there’ll be triple video poker, and then it’s 10-play video poker, 100-play video poker,” Schüll says. “When you move to the next one, you sort of can’t go back. So it’s a tolerance effect. Maybe these apps exhausted the potential to hold people to a certain point and didn’t do that work of taking it to the next, higher, more intense level.”
Regardless of the reason for the decline, one thing is for sure—dating apps are still alive and will not go away anytime soon. And if there’s anything to take away from the fact that people are jumping the Tinder ship for other dating apps, let it be that the real contenders for our love and attention are the ones that aim to hold us in place the longest. The ones that want us to keep playing the game forever.
Yes, Dating App Usage Has Somewhat Peaked
Generally speaking, dating app usage plateaued during the time of the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020. Between 2019 and 2022, the percentage of US adults using online dating sites dropped from 18 percent to 15 percent.
Generational Shifts in App Usage
Looking at the number of adults engaged in online dating doesn’t tell the whole story. In some cases, it’s a matter of some age groups falling off while others pick up the slack. In that same four-year span from 2019 to 2022, the number of US adults ages 30 to 49 who said they had ever used a dating app or site dropped by a percentage point, while more people ages 18 to 29 and 50 to 64 got into the game.
No More Pay to Play
One thing about dating apps that people are tired of? Paying for them. Growth in the number of users opting to pay for premium dating app services is petering out.
Millennials Spend Less Time Swiping
In 2018, millennials spent 90 minutes a day on dating apps. By last year, that number was down to nearly 56 minutes per day.
The Big Shift in Dating Apps? Which Ones People Use
Despite all the changes in online dating habits, the biggest shift isn’t that people are leaving apps, it’s that there are shifts in which ones are popular. The app that’s taken the biggest hit? Tinder. While total dating app downloads worldwide have remained above 120 million annually since 2020, the Tinder slice of that download pie has gotten smaller, while apps like Hinge and Bumble have seen an increase in downloads—a bit of a sick burn for the app that started it all.
