There’s a lot more to the dating app landscape than just Bumble or Hinge. For some online daters, lesser-known apps can offer some major perks, from a more manageable user list to novel features. While these apps may not totally cure Gen Z’s well-publicized dating burnout, they do at least freshen up an industry that’s been slumping in recent years.
“[These] dating apps are second tier because they’re not designed to be first tier,” says Eric Resnick, an online dating coach. “They’re just designed to serve their niche really well.”
Community-oriented dating apps are booming
For some users, the mass-market appeal of the big dating apps could be a downside. They gravitate toward more community-specific dating apps, offering platforms specifically for their background or interests.
HER, a dating app focused on queer women and nonbinary people, touts 15 million users across 115 countries. This past year has been massive for the app, with Q2 of 2024 being the biggest in the company’s history. Founder and CEO Robyn Exton calls it a “sapphic renaissance.”
“The majority of people, they’re on multiple platforms at the same time,” Exton says. “What we often see is [users will] have like one of those mainstream cis-het ones, and then they’ll have HER to speak to the part of their identity that isn’t reflected in those other products.”
HER’s paid subscribers are also booming, growing 15% in the last quarter. Exton points to this as a sign of user preference: “If people are going to have multiple products, they will often only be a premium member of one of them.”
Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, also operates several community-based apps, including Archer (for gay men), BLK (for Black singles), Chispa (Latinx singles), and Upward (for Christian singles). Match emphasized that many users have multiple dating apps downloaded, writing that “introducing Hinge in a market can lead to overall Match Group user growth, not simply a share shift among apps in the market” in a May 2023 earnings letter.
Across these identity-based apps, which Match calls their “emerging brands,” community engagement reigns supreme. The use of Discord-like community functions is up 400% across the smaller properties year-over-year, according to a Match representative. This echoes what Exton says: Smaller apps are about engaging with like-minded people, not just swiping.
Small dating apps offer new functionalities
While Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge may be geared toward different audiences, they all function on the same system: social swiping and liking. The smaller upstarts embrace new forms of technology, which can be refreshing for some users. “You can’t be the next Tinder,” says Resnick, the dating coach. “Tinder’s already the next Tinder.”
Happn, a French dating app making waves in the U.S., matches users who frequent the same spots. Their goal is to connect singles who cross paths, not just offering up the general populous of a city for swiping. Happn now counts 156 million registered users worldwide, and saw a 15% increase in paid subscribers year-over-year.
“After the end of the COVID, people wanted to meet again,” says Karima Ben Abdelmalek, CEO and president of Happn. “The new cycle of dating apps was, ‘How can we help bring back meeting people in real life?’ [That] has been the promise of Happn for a long time, since the beginning.”
Ben Abdelmalek positions Happn as the solution to swiping fatigue: “The problem is not using a dating app. The problem is staying too long on a dating app.”
Feeld, on the other hand, is all about flexibility. The app goes beyond the traditional identity tickers of a dating profile, allowing users to list their intimacy preferences and swipe jointly with partners. This has made the app particularly popular with nonmonogamous users and queer people.
“Feeld is intentionally non-prescriptive in how we’ve laid out the app, so that people can evolve their identities and preferences over time as they grow,” Dina Mohammad-Laity, Feeld’s VP of Data, wrote.
Shirking the rigidities of standard online dating has paid off: Feeld has seen an average growth of 30% year-over-year since 2022. Gen Z is Feeld’s fastest demographic, a statistic Mohammad-Laity points to as proof of success: “Seeing the steady growth of our members year-over-year says to me that we’re doing something right, especially as we see an influx of Gen Zers on Feeld despite their reticence for online dating.”
As these smaller apps push forward, they’re fighting for awareness. Sure, Tinder and Hinge have the biggest dating pools, but these apps offer community-specific features that some users crave. Why not download both?
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