Bumble is getting rid of swiping, the CEO says

Will dating app distress finally eliminate swiping? For Bumble, at least, this appears to be the case.

In an interview with Axios on Thursday, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd confirmed that Bumble will do away with swiping, a hallmark of dating apps in the 2000s.

“We’re going to say goodbye to scrolling and hello to something that I think is revolutionary for the category,” Wolf Herd said.

Bumble plans to overhaul its app later this year, after several disappointing quarters in which the app continually lost paying users. In the first quarter of this year, Bumble’s number of paid users fell nearly 21% to 3.2 million, down from 4 million last year.

The app redesign is a very serious intervention, signaling to investors that the situation is serious. But like any good CEO, Wolfe Herd made some verbal moves to argue that Bumble is doing a very good job of losing money.

“This is a period of real transformation for Bumble over the last few quarters,” she said on the quarterly earnings call this week. “We have implemented a deliberate reset of our member base. We made a clear choice to prioritize quality over quantity, focusing on engaged members with good intentions. This decision reduced overall scale, but significantly improved the health of our ecosystem.”

Based on Wolfe Herd’s previous comments about Bumble’s new direction, the company is expected to turn to artificial intelligence — Bumble is also working on an AI dating assistant called Bee, and Wolfe Herd has made many comments over the years about how AI will be a “supercharger for love and relationships.”

Of course, dating apps already use AI to determine what users should show each other. But Generation Z is turning more passive toward in-your-face AI features, and Wolfe Herd has expressed interest in a more extreme future, like having personal AI bots dating other AI bots for you. So, it’s unclear whether these Black Mirror-like initiatives will effectively attract users in their 20s. Bumble’s overhaul isn’t expected to launch until the fourth quarter of this year, so users will continue swiping for the time being.