Will dating app malaise finally end swiping? At least that seems to be the case with Bumble.
In an interview with Axios on Thursday, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd confirmed that Bumble is doing away with swiping, a signature feature of dating apps in the 2010s.
“We’re saying goodbye to Swipe and saying hello to something that I believe will be revolutionary for the category,” Wolfe Herd said.
Bumble is planning an overhaul of its app later this year after a disappointing quarter in which the app consistently lost paid users. In the first quarter of this year, Bumble had 3.2 million paid users, down about 21% from 4 million last year.
An app redesign is a pretty serious intervention and signals to investors that the situation is dire. But like any good CEO, Wolfe Herd used verbal gymnastics to claim that Bumble was doing very well in the red.
“Bumble has really been in a period of transformation over the past few quarters,” he said on a quarterly earnings call this week. “We intentionally reset our membership base. We prioritized quality over quantity and made a clear choice to focus on well-intentioned and engaged members. While that decision reduced our overall size, it meaningfully improved the health of our ecosystem.”
Based on Wolfe Herd’s past comments about Bumble’s new direction, the company is expected to lean into AI — Bumble is also working on an AI dating assistant called Bee, and Wolfe Herd has made many comments over the years about how AI will become a “supercharger for love and relationships.”
Of course, dating apps already use AI to decide what users should show each other. But Gen Z tends to be more negative about the AI capabilities in front of them, and Wolfe Herd is interested in more extreme futures, like personal AI bots dating other AI bots. Therefore, it is unclear whether these “Black Mirror”-like overtures will effectively attract users in their 20s. Bumble’s overhaul isn’t expected to begin until the final quarter of this year, so users will still be swiping for now.
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