Burnt-out love-seekers are shunning dating apps in their millions, but the apps are trying to woo them back with a counter offer: If you don’t want a lover, perhaps you just need a friend? The giants of the industry — Bumble and Match, which owns Tinder — have both created apps catering to friendly meetups, joining countless smaller platforms that have already entered the friend zone.
Bumble For Friends launched in July last year and by the third quarter of this year had around 730,000 monthly active users, according to figures from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
Bumble has also acquired the Geneva app, which caters to people wanting to form groups around particular interests.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s just the beginning of our vision to expand the company’s footprint and helping people find connections broadly,” Bumble CEO Lidiane Jones said during the Web Summit in Lisbon on Wednesday.
Match, meanwhile, launched the Yuzu app in February targeting the Asian community in the US, offering a choice between friendly or romantic encounters.
The group has also been testing a service dedicated to friendship in France on its dating app for older people, DisonsDemain.
Both firms have suffered dramatic slumps since the boom times of the pandemic, when millions turned to the apps during periods when governments restricted people’s movements.
‘APP FATIGUE
Sensor Tower said while Bumble For Friends was soaring, its dating app had shed eight percent of its monthly active users between the start of October last year and this year — the figure now standing at 21 million.
Tinder, by far the biggest dating app with around 53 million monthly active users, saw a 16 percent slump in the same period.
Seema Shah of Sensor Tower said users were feeling “app fatigue.”
“It’s affecting all apps but in particular these dating apps. People are just kind of tired of it,” she said.
Tinder was hit particularly hard as it targeted younger users between 18 and 22.
“This is the same age group that likes to do a lot of things in person,” she said.
These declines are hitting the firms where it really hurts — the wallet.
Match Group has shed more than US$40 billion from its value in three years.
Bumble achieved a valuation of more than US$20 billion when it went public in 2021, but it is now worth only about US$1.3 billion.
The firm announced the layoff of a third of its workforce in February.
And success in the friend zone is far from assured, with plenty of apps already battling to attract future BFFs.
NOVELTY FACTOR
The apps often cater to particular situations — WeRoad and TripBFF connect solo travelers, Wink and Plura help people find friends based on their interests.
French app Timeleft, launched last year, brings together six strangers every week for dinner at a restaurant.
The app has already organized dinners in 280 cities across 62 countries and is getting closer to profitability, said cofounder Maxime Barbier.
He said diners were assembled using an algorithm enriched by the results of personality tests taken by the users.
For Arthur Czubinski, a 32-year-old translator, it is a winning formula.
He said he had been to 12 dinners organized by the app in just a few months.
“Some of the tables have been incredible,” he said.
But Seema Shah suggested the first flushes of success for friendship apps were at least partly down to novelty.
She expressed doubt people would pay in the long term.
“It’s probably easier to find friends in your area if you join some activity or through your job,” she said.
By global standards, the traffic congestion that afflicts Taiwan’s urban areas isn’t horrific. But nor is it something the country can be proud of. According to TomTom, a Dutch developer of location and navigation technologies, last year Taiwan was the sixth most congested country in Asia. Of the 492 towns and cities included in its rankings last year, Taipei was the 74th most congested. Taoyuan ranked 105th, while Hsinchu County (121st), Taichung (142nd), Tainan (173rd), New Taipei City (227th), Kaohsiung (241st) and Keelung (302nd) also featured on the list. Four Japanese cities have slower traffic than Taipei. (Seoul, which has some
In our discussions of tourism in Taiwan we often criticize the government’s addiction to promoting food and shopping, while ignoring Taiwan’s underdeveloped trekking and adventure travel opportunities. This discussion, however, is decidedly land-focused. When was the last time a port entered into it? Last week I encountered journalist and travel writer Cameron Dueck, who had sailed to Taiwan in 2023-24, and was full of tales. Like everyone who visits, he and his partner Fiona Ching loved our island nation and had nothing but wonderful experiences on land. But he had little positive to say about the way Taiwan has organized its
The entire Li Zhenxiu (李貞秀) saga has been an ugly, complicated mess. Born in China’s Hunan Province, she moved to work in Shenzhen, where she met her future Taiwanese husband. Most accounts have her arriving in Taiwan and marrying somewhere between 1993 and 1999. She built a successful career in Taiwan in the tech industry before founding her own company. She also served in high-ranking positions on various environmentally-focused tech associations. She says she was inspired by the founding of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) in 2019 by Ko Wen-je (柯文哲), and began volunteering for the party soon after. Ko
Writing of the finds at the ancient iron-working site of Shihsanhang (十 三行) in New Taipei City’s Bali District (八里), archaeologist Tsang Cheng-hwa (臧振華) of the Academia Sinica’s Institute of History and Philology observes: “One bronze bowl gilded with gold, together with copper coins and fragments of Tang and Song ceramics, were also found. These provide evidence for early contact between Taiwan aborigines and Chinese.” The Shihsanhang Web site from the Ministry of Culture says of the finds: “They were evidence that the residents of the area had a close trading relation with Chinese civilians, as the coins can be
RSS