From the architecture of buildings and placement of ATMs to the design of casino carpets—all of it exemplifies strategic calculation. Sound familiar? You really don't know what you're going to get. So what does it mean then when friction enters the picture? 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 minutes daily to platforms like Bumble. 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 , while downloads of apps like Bumble and Hinge have continuously increased since 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. 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. 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. The ones that want us to keep playing the game forever.
Generally speaking, dating app usage plateaued during the time of the Covid lockdowns in Between and , the percentage of US adults using online dating sites dropped from 18 percent to 15 percent.
