There was a “Golden Age” period of dating apps (that actually coincided much with the same “golden age” of many other services including streaming), where making money wasn’t the goal, and the services actually served their official goal - pairing up people.

Problem is, any kind of dating app is self-detrimental for revenue, because if they serve that official goal, they’re essentially nixing their own customer base. Because what’s the point of a dating app? To find a person you can date, therefore you wouldn’t need a dating app anymore. If it works as advertised, users spend bare minimum time on the platform before achieving their goals and leaving it.

This simply means that a dating platform is only viable in three scenarios:

• the platform itself is an extension of an existing service, meaning it doesn’t have to be financially successful on its own as long as it helps retain users and user-minutes (aka how much time a user spends on the entirety of the service, dating included). See e.g. Facebook’s dating subsection.
• there’s VC funding, the app is in a growth phase, therefore the goals can stay as-is as long as userbase growth can be shown to the investors. Problem is, once the platform reaches critical mass and those investors want their money back, from then on, enshittification ensues.
• the platform is driven not by VC funding or connected services but by a person’s or a group of people’s genuine interest in getting people paired up. There will be ads, there will be some paid features, but it cannot scale and is therefore doomed to fail on the long run (think pre-dating-app forums specialising on dating/partner-finding)

Most dating apps fall into the second category, and in fact if you do just a moment’s research you’ll notice that some 80-90% of the highest traffic (or most known) dating apps are under a single company. Yep, there’s a literal dating apps monopoly going on that snuffs out competition, or buys them up and shuts them down, and so on.

In fact… I’m a mobile app engineer, and I’ve actually ended up applying to a few dating app startups. The one common denominator between these was not that they wanted to do something new, or wanted to engage people differently than the rest… no. It was that all of these companies were specifically made with a niche idea in mind with the sole purpose of creating a minimum viable product that catches the interest of this dating monopoly and buys the company out. Yup. My job would’ve been “make our company sellable”. You can imagine how inspiring that is, especially when there’s no offer of equity on the table…