Dating apps changed single life forever when they brought swiping, liking and ghosting to the masses.
Now, nearly two million people in the UK use online dating services to find love, according to Statista. But in the 12 years since Tinder revolutionised romance, many people say they fell out of love with the process.
“Most dating apps are just matching apps, not dating apps – I want to build a relationship,” said Zaahirah Adam, who has spent the last decade swiping on every app from Bumble, Hinge and Tinder to the League and Inner Circle.
She’s not alone. Some 78 percent of dating app users say they feel “emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted” by them, according to a 2024 study by Forbes Health.
People have come up with inventive ways to find true love for centuries, says relationships expert Marian O’Connor.
From Victorian promenading to 1920s tea dancing to lonely hearts columns in the newspaper, we’re a species that likes to matchmake. Now, hoping to make Britain flirty again, there’s a slew of entrepreneurs building the new age of dating apps.
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Take Zaahirah, a glamorous ex-bodybuilder whose day job is in finance. When we meet in London Bridge, she’s wearing a giant, fluffy jacket and a big smile. Soon though, we’re talking about existential crises.
“I woke up about two and a half years ago having probably one of the worst panic attacks of my Iife because I’m petrified I’m going to die alone,” she says.
Despite spending 10 years swiping, she has had had no luck finding The One, was sick of being ghosted (when the other person just disappears) and was increasingly uncertain she’d find someone to grow old with. Zaahira decided the apps had “got it wrong”.
Although the experience varies, most apps work in a similar way. A user signs up and creates a profile with pictures that show off their best side, some information about their life and what kind of person they’d like to meet.
They are then presented with a parade of other singles and can show their interest by “liking” their profile, the app equivalent of a flirty look across the bar.
If the other person “likes” them back, they can start messaging to find out more about each other until they decide whether to meet for a date.
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It’s a tried and tested formula that allows users to meet a wider range of people than if they’d just looked at parties or in the pub. But Zaahirah found she’d become desensitised to who she was liking, automatically saying yes to people “with a certain height and certain job titles”.
“You’ve done it for so long,” she says, “you don’t quite realise that’s what you’re doing”.
The other aspect Zaahirah found “incredibly frustrating” was the text chats back and forth to find out what the other person was like.
“The amount of people I’ve texted and then met in real life and I’m like… this is a different person,” she says.
Skipping profile pictures and texting
She decided to do something about it, and built Hati, a dating app for people who want long-term relationships. It skips the profile pictures and texting altogether.
Instead, users hear a voice note recorded by the person, then a video about them. Then, if both users want to chat, the app schedules a five-minute phone call.
“The reason dating apps are so terrible for all of us is because you don’t know the person behind the screen,” she says. “In a five-minute call, you’ll learn more about someone than in 50 messages over seven days.”
Marian says those first few conversations are an important time to find common ground with the other person.
She adds: “Often my experience with those for whom [online dating] is successful is that there’s often a vague connection, almost as if they could have met at a party through a friend of a friend.”
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Taking on catfish
Down the road in Essex, Johanna Mason is tackling a different downside to online dating; the dreaded catfish.
Catfishing is when someone creates a misleading online persona in order to trick others. It’s become a real problem in dating; in the US around 70,000 people reported being scammed by a catfish in 2022, up from just 11,000 in 2016.
Johanna was stuck in “Groundhog Day, constantly searching and being disappointed” by online dating. But her real bugbear was fake profiles.
“There just seemed to be so many,” she says. “You had to become a private investigator to find out whether who you were talking to was genuine or not before you waste your time.”
So, like Zaahira, she decided to solve her own problem and launched Cherry, an online dating app with a focus on profile verification.
In order to register, users have to show their government-issued ID, either a passport or driving licence, and then complete checks so the app can confirm they are who they say they are.
When the company ran focus groups with a mixture of single people, they found 54% had come across fake profiles and scammers on other dating apps, and concerningly, 38% had fallen victim to them.
“You’ve got some people that are getting conned out of thousands of pounds from someone that’s in a completely different country, and it’s preying on people’s vulnerabilities. People are genuinely trying to meet someone,” says Jo.
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In a bid to make true matches more likely, Jo put a “vibes” feature into her app. Now, people looking only for a casual relationship won’t be shown the profiles of people looking for marriage.
“Dating is serious,” says Marian. “For a lot of people going on an app is saying ‘I have a serious intention to find love’.” But she cautions that the heart and the mind may not be in agreement.
“People might say ‘I’m fancy-free, looking for sex and fun’ but once they start a sexual relationship with somebody, they feel more committed. And then they can get quite disappointed.”
App for vegans and vegetarians
Presenting the perfect match is a feature taken to the extreme by Alex Felipelli, a vegan software engineer in Brazil.
He was swiping away on Tinder and Happn, a popular dating app in the country, for years and “feeling the struggle” as he calls it. He spoke to fellow vegans and vegetarians who agreed: they wanted their own dating app.
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Soon, he set up Veggly, which has become the world’s biggest dating app for vegans and vegetarians, then in 2022, launched Lefty, an app for left-wing singles. It’s not about making more echo chambers, he insists, it’s just practical.
According to data gathered by the company, 76% of potential daters would prefer a serious relationship with someone holding the same political position.
Marian’s not surprised. “Sometimes you just want to come home to somebody who shares [your values]. You want some excitement and some difference, but it is exhausting if you have to fight every point,” she says.
Filtering romance by ideology isn’t just an online phenomenon; in 2022, the then-Labour frontbencher Lucy Powell was accused of stirring up division when she posed in a T-shirt that proudly declared she’d “never kissed a Tory”.
The research was proved right. In the week of the US election results, Lefty saw a 453% increase in downloads in just five days. With all of these apps, the critical element is people using them.
Dating apps don’t work if there are no dates and now, all three entrepreneurs face the task of trying to lure singles to their smaller, more specific platforms.
