Tinder made Lauren Grauer really feel like a delinquent dater.
Whereas watching movies on YouTube final month, the New York expertise marketer was served an advert for “Double Date,” a brand new characteristic the relationship app launched that lets customers pair their profiles with associates to swipe on different paired matches.
Grauer was shocked by the information. 4 years in the past, she’d primarily thought to do the identical factor by making a double date profile of her and a pal. The concept obtained her kicked off the app.
“The rationale I obtained banned from Tinder is what they’re promoting now,” Grauer says in a TikTok video. “I don’t wish to be again. You don’t must un-ban me—it’s wonderful. However you made me really feel like a legal.” (The corporate’s community guidelines prohibit account sharing.)
Double Date is one in every of greater than a dozen options Tinder has introduced as a part of its ongoing rebrand beneath its newest chief government, Spencer Rascoff, who desires to create a recent id for the world’s hottest relationship app round social, low-pressure connections.
In contrast to each different relationship app battling for engagement, Tinder has uniquely struggled to innovate in a discipline the place it was as soon as thought-about the usual. Although Grindr launched in 2009 as the primary geo-location hookup app—tailor-made particularly round homosexual need—it was Tinder, which arrived in 2012, that utterly overhauled on-line relationship. Swiping for love was an enormous hit amongst love-sick singles, and burgeoning apps, together with Bumble, Feeld, and Raya, flooded the market within the following years.
By 2016, Tinder had an estimated 50 million customers and was the largest relationship app within the US, with 25 p.c of the market share. As time handed, although, daters started to deal with digital courtship like a sport—swiping till they reached the ultimate stage. Vainness Honest as soon as referred to as it the “Dawn of the Dating Apocalypse.” Within the remaining quarter of 2025, paying Tinder members dropped 8 percent, to eight.8 million.
This month, throughout a media occasion on the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles, Rascoff formally reintroduced Tinder to the general public. The place swipes have been as soon as a measure of success, the corporate’s benchmarks have modified relating to consumer satisfaction. “Simply getting matches just isn’t the aim,” Rascoff stated of shifting priorities. “Persons are craving connection. People want people.”
Tinder, like almost each different relationship app in the marketplace, is betting on AI to not solely innovate however reestablish belief with customers. However can the app revitalize the relationship panorama many say it ruined?
Along with a profile redesign, two of its new marquee merchandise embrace astrology mode, which pairs folks primarily based on their zodiac compatibility, and Chemistry, an AI-powered device that analyzes a consumer’s digicam roll to study extra about their pursuits and character. The corporate, which was topic to an alleged data breach in January, says it doesn’t retailer the information analyzed from images.
Tinder can also be making AI upgrades to its Are You Positive? characteristic, which alerts customers of probably “dangerous language” they’ve typed earlier than they hit Ship, and “Does This Trouble You,” which detects probably profane messages being despatched to customers, robotically blurring the textual content so the receiver can’t see it with out tapping by way of. (Auto-blur is only for textual content messages; Tinder, like all Match-owned apps, doesn’t permit non-public picture change.)
However “dangerous language” is a considerably subjective idea. And the apps can typically be notably brutal for marginalized folks.
Kobe Mehki, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter in Los Angeles, who’s trans and rejoined Tinder in January, says she is continually having to defend her identity. “So many males have been saying, Hey, you’re so fairly. However would ask, Are you trans? Are you trans? It was so jarring. I’ve by no means had it occur a lot,” she says. “Males are solely hypersexualizing me or asking questions on me as if I’m not even an actual particular person. They discredit the rest—my coronary heart, my character, my ambitions—and it makes me wish to simply retreat and never even method relationship.”
