For more than two years, it’s been clear that something at Bumble wasn’t working. As the dating app lost users—in a more accelerated way than its also-struggling competitors—it has been trying to figure out what today’s daters want from the app that rose to fame with its pledge that “women make the first move.”
Yesterday, the app announced that it’s officially doing away with that longtime product feature. Any user, man or woman, can now send the opening message in a heterosexual match on Bumble. Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who took the company public in 2021, left, and then returned as CEO in early 2025, told Bloomberg that the change was “not a reversal of our principles or our DNA or our original mission.” Instead, it reflects what users expect today.
Indeed, this change has been a long time coming. In March 2024, I broke the news that Bumble’s then-CEO Lidiane Jones was considering rolling back the requirement that women send the first message on the app. “It feels like a burden for a subset of our users,” she told me at the time. Two months later, the app introduced what it called “opening moves”—a way for men to not quite fully start the conversation, but choose pre-selected questions to nudge it forward. Two years later, Bumble is now going all the way and fully eliminating its gender-specific conversation-starter rules.
Product-wise, that’s probably a good thing. “Women make the first move” was always a better brand than it was product feature. Men had 24 hours to reply before a conversation expired—so sending the first message didn’t give women that much control over the match. (That’s now been extended to 72 hours.) Limiting who can send the first note didn’t solve the issue of low-effort messages on either side. And women are now so exhausted by dating apps that, as Jones said, sending the first message felt more like a burden than empowerment to many.
Between the second quarters of 2025 and 2026, Bumble app revenue fell almost 15% and the number of paying users fell almost 17%. Even within parent company Bumble Inc., that was a sharper drop-off than other apps. Will this fix it?
The problem is that Bumble hasn’t found a strong identity to replace the one it’s leaving behind. Without “women make the first move,” what is Bumble? I don’t think it knows—and neither do we. What reason does a user have to choose the app, if it’s the same as every other dating app on the market? A brand that millennials loved didn’t make up for a lackluster product. And now, Bumble’s core constituency is Gen Z women. In just a few years the oldest members of Gen Alpha (!) will be old enough for dating apps too.
Wolfe Herd returned to the company more than a year ago with the mandate to answer these questions—so far, we’re still waiting.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
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