Can Tinder Fix The Dating Landscape It Helped Ruin?
Tinder did Lauren Grauer feels like a delinquent flirt.
While watching videos on YouTube last month, the New York talent marketer received an ad for “Double Date,” a new feature launched by the dating app that allows users to pair their profiles with friends to swipe on other matched matches.
Grauer was shocked by the news. Four years ago, she essentially thought about doing the same thing by creating a dual profile of herself and a friend. The idea led her to quit the app.
“The reason I got banned from Tinder is what they’re advertising now,” Grauer said in a TikTok video. “I don’t want to come back. You don’t need to unblock me, that’s fine. But you made me feel like a criminal.” (The company’s community guidelines prohibit account sharing.)
Double Date is one of more than a dozen features Tinder has announced as part of its ongoing rebranding under its latest chief executive, Spencer Rascoff, who wants to create a new identity for the world’s most popular dating app around low-pressure, social connections.
Unlike every other dating app struggling for engagement, Tinder has struggled to innovate in an area where it was once considered the norm. Although Grindr launched in 2009 as the first location-based app, specifically tailored to gay desire, it was Tinder, arriving in 2012, that completely overhauled online dating. Swiping for love was a big hit among singles in love, and booming apps including Bumble, Feeld, and Raya flooded the market over the next few years.
In 2016, Tinder had approximately 50 million users and was the largest dating app in the United States, with a 25% market share. Over time, however, daters began to treat digital courtship like a game: swiping until they reached the final level. Vanity Fair It was once called “the dawn of the dating apocalypse.” In the last quarter of 2025, the number of paying Tinder members fell by 8%, to 8.8 million.
This month, during a media event at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles, Rascoff officially reintroduced Tinder to the public. Where swipes were once a measure of success, the company’s benchmarks have changed when it comes to user satisfaction. “Just getting games is not the goal,” Rascoff said of the changing priorities. “People crave connection. Humans need humans.”
Like all other dating apps on the market, Tinder is banking on AI not only to innovate but also to restore user trust. But can the app revitalize the dating landscape, which many say is ruined?
In addition to a profile overhaul, two of its new flagship products include Astrology Mode, which matches people based on their zodiac compatibility, and Chemistry, an AI-powered tool that analyzes a user’s camera roll to learn more about their interests and personality. The company, which was the subject of an alleged data breach in January, says it does not store data analyzed from photos.
Tinder is also bringing AI upgrades to its Are You Sure? feature, which alerts users to “potentially harmful language” they typed before pressing Send, and “Does this bother you”, which detects potentially rude messages sent to users, automatically blurring the text so the recipient cannot see it without pressing it. (Autoblur is only for text messages; Tinder, like all Match-owned apps, doesn’t allow the exchange of private images.)
But “harmful language” is a somewhat subjective concept. And the apps can often be particularly brutal for marginalized people.
Kobe Mehki, a 23-year-old singer-songwriter from Los Angeles who is trans and joined Tinder in January, says she constantly has to defend her identity. “So many men said: Hey, you’re so pretty. But they asked: Are you trans? Are you trans? It was so shocking. This has never happened to me so much,” she says. “Men just hypersexualize me or ask questions about me like I’m not even a real person. They discredit everything else – my heart, my personality, my ambitions – and it makes me want to withdraw and not even broach the idea of dating.
