Bumble’s CEO just told investors the swipe is dying, and she has something to replace it. She won’t say what yet. That’s either a confident tease or a delay tactic, depending on how much you trust a company that just reported a 15.2% year-over-year revenue decline.
On its Q2 earnings call, Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd announced that its newest product, Plans, had shown “promising results” in early testing. Plans is a separate app designed to connect people through small group meetups like drinks or dinners at local spots, with no swiping required and no need to hand over a phone number. Users can continue conversations directly inside Bumble’s main app. The pitch is low-pressure socializing that might lead to friendship, romance, or just a decent Tuesday night out.
This is not a Bumble-only trend. Tinder made similar noise this week about doubling down on in-person events. When the two biggest names in dating apps both pivot toward real-world gatherings in the same week, that’s not coincidence. That’s the industry reading the same user data and arriving at the same uncomfortable conclusion: the swipe model is burning out, especially with younger users.
Gen Z’s fatigue with traditional dating apps is well-documented at this point. Endless queues of profile cards, low match rates, high ghosting rates, and the general feeling of being sorted like a product have pushed a lot of users to either quit apps entirely or treat them as a last resort. Bumble already tested the waters with Bumble BFF, its friend-finding app, which gained some traction with Gen Z women. Plans takes that logic further by removing dating as the stated goal altogether, which is a meaningful design choice. If you’re not officially “on a date,” the stakes feel lower.
Wolfe Herd was direct about the direction: “I am a firm believer that the future of meeting people in groups will become more important. Group socializing is a real part of how Gen Z prefers to meet, and we believe Bumble represents a natural bridge from meeting to socializing to then dating.” That framing positions Bumble less as a dating app and more as a social layer, which is a harder product to build but potentially a stickier one.
The more interesting part of the call was what she didn’t fully reveal. Wolfe Herd confirmed that Bumble is building a new interaction model to replace the swipe across its main app, describing it as “a shift away from optimizing for swipe speed and velocity towards something more intentional, fewer, better, more considered signals.” She declined to say what that looks like, citing competitive reasons, but said the transition would be gradual to avoid disrupting existing behavior. AI tools are also being added to improve matching, though she was careful to say Bumble is not becoming an “AI-driven experience.”
But the business context here matters. Bumble beat earnings expectations in Q2, which is something. Still, revenue at $210.5 million was down 15.2% year-over-year, and the Q3 forecast points to a further decline in paying subscribers. That’s a company in real trouble trying to engineer a product comeback at the same time it’s managing financial pressure. The swipe-free future Wolfe Herd is describing sounds compelling on a slide deck. Whether it translates into user growth and revenue recovery is a separate question entirely, and one that won’t be answered by a vague tease on an earnings call.
For now, the key things to watch are:
- How fast Plans scales beyond early test markets and whether group meetup behavior actually converts to Bumble app engagement
- What the replacement for swiping actually is when Bumble decides to show it publicly
- Whether Tinder’s parallel push into IRL events moves faster and captures the same Gen Z audience first
- How paying subscriber numbers trend over the next two quarters as the product strategy shifts
Bumble is making a real bet here, not just running a marketing campaign. But it’s doing so from a weakened financial position, against a competitor with more users and more resources. The swipe may well be dying. What fills that space, and who fills it first, is the actual race.
