Relationship app Bumble continues to lose its footing. After subpar earnings, sluggish person progress, and inside stagnation, the corporate has laid off 30% of its employees. In the meantime, its courting app competitor Grindr is hovering.
Amongst courting apps, Match Group’s properties—largely Hinge, generally Tinder—lead the market. The duo’s ubiquity body apps like Bumble and Grindr as boutique alternate options, designed for his or her progressive options or specialty person bases. That’s a tough market to occupy, particularly as courting app fatigue units in and Gen Z appears to push for extra in-person (and sexless) encounters. These elements are simply a part of the rationale why Bumble and its rivals are falling behind.
However LGBTQ+ hookup app Grindr is flourishing—posting strong progress in each person acquisition and income. In Could, Grindr CEO George Arison spoke with Quick Firm about his efforts to construct a broader providing on the muse of its core location-based grid of customers—together with some standard new options and a foray into telemedicine. He isn’t satisfied that generational patterns fully clarify the struggles of courting apps.
“This complete ‘Gen Z-avoiding-apps’ factor makes no logical sense. Gen Z loves TikTok and loves Reels and thinks you’ll be able to learn one thing on-line and also you’re an skilled in it, however they’re not gonna do courting on-line?,” he says. “What I do assume and what makes logical sense, is that should you don’t construct a product that Gen Zers need, they’re not going to make use of it. That’s the place I feel a few of our friends have fallen flat.”
His imaginative and prescient remains to be in progress, however right here’s how the corporate’s fixed efforts to check and scale new concepts may function a information to its rivals.
Evaluating Bumble and Grindr
Bumble and Grindr each went public within the early 2020s, when the courting app market was nonetheless sizzling due to the pandemic’s digital increase. Since their IPOs, each Bumble and Grindr have hit tough waters—although Grindr managed to proper itself whereas Bumble continues to, nicely, bumble.
Bumble’s inventory opened at $43 per share—a peak it hasn’t reached since late 2021. In 2025, Bumble’s share worth was hovering round $5 in early June, leaping above $6 solely on the information of layoffs earlier this week. In the meantime, Grindr—which debuted at $16.90 in 2022, initially dropped to $5, however has been above $15 since November 2024 and exceeded $20 per share since mid-April.
Income figures have advised the same story. Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd returned to Bumble in March on the eve of some bitter information: Bumble’s Q1 earnings confirmed an 8% lower in income year-over-year. For a similar quarter, Grindr’s income grew 25% over the prior 12 months.
Arison advised Quick Firm he sees the corporate’s efficiency as a mirrored image of the contributions that the LGBTQ+ neighborhood—he’s homosexual himself—could make to the enterprise world. “A part of our mission needs to be we do tremendous nicely as a enterprise and we drive all people to alter,” he says.
Neither app releases constant and particular person counts. Grindr seems to be rising its person base as Bumble’s beneficial properties are gradual. In its Q1 earnings, Grindr reported “greater than 14.5 million” month-to-month lively customers, up from “greater than 13.5 million” the 12 months prior. Bumble’s earnings are break up by paying customers, a spotlight for former CEO Lidiane Jones. Whereas the corporate grew its paying app customers by 11% in 2024, it has since shed 100,000 of these subscribers in 2025.
What ought to a courting app seem like?
Underneath Arison’s management, Grindr has changed into an innovation powerhouse. In his Could interview, Arison emphasised the creation of Albums—bundles of photographs despatched through chats and never immediately displayed on a profile—which debuted in 2022. In 2024, Grindr customers despatched over two billion albums. He additionally pointed towards the app’s new Proper Now function, which lets customers search particularly for extra rapid motion. In D.C. and Sydney, two of the function’s trial markets, Arison mentioned that “25 to 35% of our weekly lively customers have been commonly going into the Proper Now expertise at the least as soon as per week.”
Grindr’s new options can be found for all customers, although paid subscribes obtain extra makes use of. For instance, free Grindr customers get to submit to the Proper Now feed thrice per week. Down the road, the corporate plans to make classes accessible for buy. That’s a part of Arison’s technique: Opening new options with limitations as a bridge to paid buyer conversion.
“I don’t need Grindr to finish up like a few of our rivals, who hollowed out their merchandise focusing solely on monetization and constructing nothing,” Arison advised Quick Firm. “We’re doing product-led processes—it’s not simply monetize, monetize, monetize. We’re saying: Construct new issues, and people issues will result in income.”
In distinction, Bumble has moved slowly with their function rollouts. The “Opening Strikes” function debuted in 2024, permitting customers to record prompts for brand new matches to reply to. The function undercut Bumble’s preliminary mission that girls ought to message first. Since then, they’ve additionally instituted ID verification and date-sharing security options. Lots of the app’s most compelling options—like backtracking left swipes, Journey Mode, and Incognito Mode—are solely accessible to paid customers.
With courting app fatigue on the rise, each Bumble and Grindr have additionally expanded into alternate markets. Each have emphasised the position of friendship and platonic encounters on their apps, with Arison selling Grindr’s ongoing effort to turn into the “international gayborhood in your pocket,” noting “Our youthful, 18-plus cohort desires to be in an surroundings the place there are older folks as nicely. Friendships between youthful and older individuals are rather more widespread in our neighborhood.”
Bumble launched its friend-focused Bumble B.F.F. in 2016, and broke it out right into a stand-alone app, Bumble for Buddies, in 2023. Whereas Bumble for Buddies doesn’t launch stand-alone person numbers, its million-plus Google Play downloads is dwarfed by Bumble’s greater than 50 million downloads. Grindr’s “gayborhood” mannequin additionally flows simply with the unique app; customers have been using Grindr for non-dating actions since its creation. By spinning their Buddies perform out right into a separate app, Bumble should hunt down a wholly separate person base.
On this space, Grindr is making a equally large wager on the way it can present up in numerous methods for its customers. The corporate just lately launched Woodwork, a telemedicine firm promoting erectile dysfunction capsules, in Illinois and Pennsylvania. Arison additionally predicted that Grindr would broaden into “haircare, skincare, and different issues of that nature.”
“Once I began speaking to shareholders, a part of the dialog was: What do we would like Grindr to be? Only a courting app or one thing extra?” Arison advised Quick Firm. “Their view was very sturdy: We wish to be much more.”
