Dating apps changed singles’ lives forever when they brought swiping, liking, and ghosting to the masses.
Today, 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 cycling through everything from Bumble, Hinge and Tinder at League and Inner Circle.
She is not alone. According to a 2024 study by Forbes Health, approximately 78% of dating app users report feeling “emotionally, mentally, or physically exhausted.”
From walks to tea dances to columns of lonely hearts, we are a species that loves meeting people. Photo: iStock
People have been finding inventive ways to find true love for centuries, says relationship expert Marian O’Connor.
From the Victorian promenade to the 1920s tea dance to newspaper columns about lonely hearts, we are a species that loves to meet people. Now, hoping to make Britain attractive again, many entrepreneurs are building the new era of dating apps.
Zaahirah Adam founded dating app Hati after becoming frustrated trying to find love
“Petrified, I will die alone”
Take Zaahirah, a glamorous former bodybuilder whose day job is in finance. When we meet at London Bridge, she’s wearing a giant, fluffy jacket and a big smile. But soon, we are talking 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’m petrified of dying alone,” she says.
Despite spending 10 years swiping, she had no luck finding The One, was tired of being ghosted (when the other person disappears), and was increasingly unsure of finding someone one to grow old with. Zaahira decided the apps had “gone wrong.”
Although experience varies, most apps work the same. A user signs up and creates a profile with photos that show their best side, information about their life and the 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 equivalent of a flirty glance across the bar.
If the other person “likes” them back, they can start messaging to find out more about each other until they decide to meet for a date.
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This is a proven formula that allows users to meet more people than if they were just watching parties or at the pub. But Zaahirah found she had become insensitive to who she liked, automatically saying yes to people “of a certain height and job titles.”
“You’ve been doing this for so long,” she said, “you don’t really realize this is what you’re doing.”
The other part Zaahirah found “incredibly frustrating” was the text exchanges to find out what the other person was like.
“The number of people I’ve texted and then met in real life and I’m like… that’s a different person,” she says.
Ignore profile photos and text messages
She decided to do something about it and created Hati, a dating app for people who want long-term relationships. It completely ignores profile pictures and text messages.
Instead, users hear a voice note recorded by the person and then a video of 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 will learn more about someone than in 50 messages spread over seven days.”
Marian says these first 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 is often a vague connection, almost as if they might have met at a party through the friend of a friend.”
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Cherry was designed to try to prevent people from being cheated on dating apps. Photo: Cherry
Tackle catfish
In Essex, Johanna Mason tackles another downside of online dating; the dreaded catfish.
Catfishing is when someone creates a deceptive online persona in order to deceive others. This has become a real problem in dating; In the United States, around 70,000 people reported being scammed by a catfish in 2022, compared to just 11,000 in 2016.
Johanna Mason founded the dating app Cherry when she was tired of constantly seeing fake profiles
Johanna was stuck in “Groundhog Day, constantly searching and disappointed” with online dating. But his real problem is fake profiles.
“There seemed to be so many,” she said. “You had to become a private detective to find out if the person you were talking to was genuine or not before you wasted your time.”
So, like Zaahira, she decided to solve her own problem and launched Cherry, an online dating app focused on profile verification.
To sign up, users must present their official 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 conducted focus groups of a mix of singles, it found that 54% of them had encountered fake profiles and scammers on other dating apps, and, worryingly, 38 % had been victims.
“There are people being scammed out of thousands of pounds by someone who is in a completely different country, and it preys on people’s vulnerabilities. People are really trying to meet someone,” says Jo.
In an effort to make real matches more likely, Jo has integrated a “vibes” feature into her app. Now, people only looking for a casual relationship will not see the profiles of people looking for marriage.
“Dating is serious,” says Marian. “For many people, using an app is saying, ‘I’m serious about finding love.’ But she warns that the heart and mind might not agree.
“People may say, ‘I don’t have any fantasy, I’m looking for sex and pleasure,’ but once they start a sexual relationship with someone, they feel more committed. And then they can be very disappointed.
Alex Felipelli, a vegan software engineer in Brazil who created Veggly and Lefty. Photo: Alex Felipelli
Application 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 had been using Tinder and Happn, a popular dating app in the country, for years and “felt the struggle,” as he calls it. He talked to other vegans and vegetarians who agreed: They wanted their own dating app.
Soon, he created Veggly, which became the world’s largest dating app for vegans and vegetarians, and then in 2022, launched Lefty, an app for left-wing singles. It’s not about creating more echo chambers, he insists, it’s just practical.
According to data collected by the company, 76% of potential daters would prefer a serious relationship with someone in the same political position.
Marian is not surprised. “Sometimes you just want to go home to someone who shares (your values). You want excitement and difference, but it’s exhausting to have to fight for every point,” she says.
Filtering romances by ideology isn’t just an online phenomenon; in 2022, Lucy Powell, then a Labor MP, was accused of stoking division when she posed in a T-shirt that proudly declared she had “never kissed a Tory”.
The research turned out to be accurate. During the week of the US election results, Lefty saw a 453% increase in downloads in just five days. With all of these apps, the most important thing is the people who use them.
Dating apps don’t work if there are no dates and now the three entrepreneurs face the task of trying to attract singles to their smaller, more specific platforms.