Dating apps changed singles’ lives forever when they brought swiping, liking, and ghosting to the masses.
Currently, almost two million people in the UK use online dating services to find love, according to Statista. But in the 12 years since Tinder revolutionized romance, many people say they’ve fallen 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 browsing everything from Bumble, Hinge and Tinder to League and Internal Circle.
She is not alone. About 78 percent of dating app users say they feel “emotionally, psychologically, or physically exhausted” by them, according to a 2024 study by Forbes Wellness.
People have devised ingenious ways to find true love for centuries, says relationship expert Marian O’Connor.
From Victorian promenades to 1920s tea dances and lonely hearts columns in the newspaper, we’re a species that likes matchmaking. Now, in the hope of getting Britain flirty again, there are a host of entrepreneurs creating the new age of dating apps.
‘Petrified I’m going to die alone’
Take Zaahirah, a glamorous former bodybuilder whose day job is in finance. When we meet on London Bridge, she’s wearing a giant fluffy jacket and a big smile. However, soon we will talk about existential crises.
“I woke up about two and a half years ago with probably one of the worst panic attacks of my life because I was afraid of dying alone,” she says.
Despite spending 10 years stealing, she’s had no luck finding The One, was sick of being ghosted (when the other person just disappears), and was increasingly unsure of finding someone to grow old with. Zaahira decided that the applications “had made a mistake.”
Although experience varies, most apps perform comparably. A user registers and creates a profile with photographs that show their best side, information about their life and what kind of person they would like to meet.
They are then presented with a parade of other singles and can show their interest by “liking” their profile, the app’s equivalent of a flirtatious glance across the bar.
If the other person “likes” you too, you can start messaging to find out more about each other until you decide whether or not to meet up for a date.
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Would you talk about politics on a first date?
It’s a proven formula that allows users to meet a wider range of people than if they had simply looked at parties or in the pub. But Zaahirah discovered that she had become desensitized to who she liked and automatically said yes to people “with a certain height and certain jobs.”
“You’ve been doing it for so long,” he says, “that you don’t realize what you’re doing.”
The other aspect Zaahirah found “incredibly frustrating” was the back-and-forth text conversations trying to find out what the other person was like.
“The number of people I’ve texted and then met in real life made me think… this is a different person,” he says.
Skip profile pictures and text messages
He decided to do something about it and created Hati, a dating app for people who want long-term relationships. He completely skips profile pictures and text messages.
Instead, users hear a voice note recorded by the person and 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,” he says. “In a five-minute call, you will learn more about someone than in 50 messages over seven days.”
Marian says those first conversations are an important time to find common ground with the other person.
And he adds: “Often my experience with those for whom (online dating) The good thing is that there is often a vague connection, almost as if they had met at a party through a friend of a friend.”
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Cherry was designed to try to prevent people from being scammed on dating apps. Photo: cherry
Taking on the catfish
Down the road in Essex, Johanna Mason is tackling a different problem with online dating; the dreaded catfish.
Catfishing is when someone creates a deceptive online persona to deceive others. It has become a real problem in dating; In the United States, around 70,000 people reported being scammed by catfish in 2022, up from just 11,000 in 2016.
Johanna Mason founded dating app Cherry when she got tired of constantly seeing fake profiles
Johanna was stuck in “Groundhog Day, constantly searching and being disappointed” by online dating. But their real problem was fake profiles.
“There seemed to be a lot of them,” he says. “You had to become a private investigator to find out if who you were talking to was genuine or not before you wasted your time.”
So, like Zaahira, he decided to solve his own problem and launched Cherry, an online dating app focused on profile verification.
To register, users must show their government-issued ID, either a passport or driver’s license, and then complete verifications so the app can confirm they are who they say they are.
Photo: iStock
When the company held focus groups with a mix of single people, they found that 54% had encountered fake profiles and scammers on other dating apps and, more worryingly, 38% had fallen victim to them.
“There are some people who are being scammed out of thousands of pounds from someone who is in a completely different country, and they are taking advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. People are really trying to get to know someone,” Jo says.
In a bid to make real matches more likely, Jo incorporated a “vibes” feature into her app. Now, people looking only for a casual relationship will not be shown the profiles of people looking for marriage.
“Dating is serious,” says Marian. “For many people, accessing an app is saying ‘I’m serious about finding love.’” But he warns that the heart and mind may not agree.
“People may say, ‘I’m fantasy-free, I’m looking for sex and fun,’ but once they start a sexual relationship with someone, they feel more committed. And then they can be quite disappointed.”
Alex Felipelli, a vegan software engineer in Brazil who created Veggly and Lefty. Photo: Alex Felipelli
App for vegans and vegetarians
Presenting the perfect match is a trait taken to the extreme by Alex Felipelli, a vegan software engineer in Brazil.
He had been browsing 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.
Soon, he created Veggly, which has become the world’s largest dating app for vegans and vegetarians, and then in 2022, he launched Lefty, an app for left-wing singles. It is not about creating more echo chambers, he insists, but simply about something practical.
According to data collected by the company, 76% of potential daters would prefer a serious relationship with someone who holds the same political position as them.
Marian is not surprised. “Sometimes you just want to come home to someone who shares (your values). You want some excitement and some difference, but it’s exhausting having to fight for every point,” he says.
Filtering romance by ideology is not just an online phenomenon; In 2022, then Labor leader Lucy Powell was accused of being divisive when she posed in a T-shirt proudly declaring that she had “never kissed a Conservative”.
The investigation turned out to be correct. 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 that people use them.
Dating apps don’t work without dates and now the three entrepreneurs are faced with the task of trying to attract singles to their smaller, more targeted platforms.
