Something interesting has been happening in my friend group over the past year or so, and I think it's a reflection of something much bigger going on across the whole UK. One by one, people I know have been deleting the apps they've used for years — Tinder, Bumble, Hinge — and either giving up on dating apps entirely or quietly switching to something smaller and more specific. The big apps are losing their grip, and for the first time since I started online dating at about twenty-two, it feels like the landscape is genuinely shifting. I've been thinking a lot about why this is happening, and specifically about why one particular app seems to be on the other side of this trend — growing while the giants are shrinking. I don't have hard data to throw at you here. What I've got is eight years of personal experience navigating the UK dating app scene, observations from the people around me, and a lot of opinions that I've been dying to get down in writing. So here we go.
App Fatigue Is Real and It's Everywhere
Let me start with the problem, because I think it's important to understand what's gone wrong before we talk about what's going right. The simple truth is that most people I know are exhausted by dating apps. Not mildly annoyed, not slightly frustrated — genuinely, bone-deep exhausted. And it's not because they've given up on meeting someone. It's because the experience of using the major apps has become so miserable that it actively makes them feel worse about dating. I'm talking about the endless swiping that goes nowhere, the conversations that fizzle after three messages, the matches that never reply, the feeling that you're just one face in an infinite scroll of faces and nobody is actually paying attention to anyone. There's a special kind of loneliness that comes from being on a dating app with millions of users and still struggling to have a single meaningful interaction. I've felt it. Everyone I know has felt it.
The big apps created this problem by chasing growth above everything else. Their business model depends on having the largest possible user base, which means they've spent years making it as easy as possible to sign up and as difficult as possible to leave. But somewhere along the way, quantity killed quality. When everyone is on the app, the app becomes meaningless. There's no shared understanding of why anyone is there. You've got people looking for marriage sitting next to people looking for a one-night stand, and neither of them knows which they're talking to until it's too late and someone's feelings are hurt. The apps don't care because more users means more revenue, and if the experience is frustrating enough that you buy premium features to try and make it less frustrating, even better. It's a machine designed to extract money from your loneliness, and people are finally waking up to that.
Why Tinder and Bumble Are Bleeding Users
I deleted Tinder about two years ago and I haven't looked back once. The app I deleted bore almost no resemblance to the app I'd signed up for years earlier. What used to feel exciting and novel had become a grind. The algorithm seemed designed to show me the worst possible matches first, presumably so I'd pay for Tinder Gold to see the supposedly better ones. The conversations were dire. Half the profiles looked fake or abandoned. And every time I opened it, I felt a little wave of dread rather than anticipation. That's when I knew it was time to go. I don't want to feel dread when I'm trying to meet people. That defeats the entire purpose.
Bumble's decline has been different but equally telling. Bumble built its brand on female empowerment — women message first, women set the pace. And for a while, that genuinely felt like a good thing. But the reality is that putting the burden of initiating every conversation on women didn't empower anyone; it just exhausted one half of the user base while the other half sat back and waited. And once you got past that first message, Bumble was basically the same experience as every other app. Same ambiguity about intentions, same conversations that went nowhere, same frustration. The feminist branding started to feel hollow when the actual product wasn't any better than its competitors. I know loads of women in Glasgow who were die-hard Bumble users a few years ago and have since moved on because the experience just didn't live up to the promise.
Hinge has probably held up better than the other two, but even Hinge has started to feel stale. The "designed to be deleted" tagline is clever marketing, but if the app were actually succeeding at that, their user numbers would be shrinking because everyone had found someone and left. The reality is that people stay on Hinge for months or years, cycling through the same profiles, having the same kinds of conversations, not finding what they're looking for. It's a slightly more polished version of the same fundamental problem: too many people, not enough clarity about what anyone actually wants.
What Kommons Is Doing Differently
Against this backdrop of fatigue and frustration, Kommons app has been doing something that seems almost counterintuitively simple: being honest about what it is and who it's for. The app doesn't pretend to be the place where you'll find your soulmate. It doesn't wrap itself in aspirational branding about finding "the one." It's straightforward about being a platform for people in the UK who want casual dating, and that clarity is genuinely revolutionary in a market where every other app is deliberately vague about its purpose because vagueness captures more users.
Think about why that matters. When you sign up, you know what the people on there are looking for. They know what you're looking for. There's no awkward conversation three dates in where someone admits they were actually hoping for a relationship and now they're upset. There's no guessing game. There's no deception. Everyone's on the same page from the moment they create their profile, and that shared understanding completely changes the dynamic of every interaction. Conversations are more relaxed because nobody's trying to figure out the other person's hidden agenda. Dates are more enjoyable because expectations are aligned. The whole experience is just lighter and more honest, and I think that's why people keep coming back to it.
The UK-only focus is the other thing that I think is actually a massive advantage, even though from a traditional business perspective it probably looks like a limitation. Being UK-only means the team can design everything around the British dating experience. The cultural context is shared. You don't have to explain to someone what a "cheeky Nando's" is or why suggesting a first date at the pub is perfectly acceptable rather than low-effort. There's a shared understanding of humour, of social norms, of how people communicate. I've dated people from the app in Glasgow and there's always this baseline level of cultural compatibility that I never experienced when I was on apps full of people from all over the world. It's not that international connections can't work — of course they can — but there's something comfortable about knowing the person you're chatting to understands the same cultural references you do.
The Rise of the Niche Platform
It isn't the only smaller platform that's doing well right now, and I think that's worth acknowledging because it points to a broader trend that I find really encouraging. Across the board, niche dating platforms — apps and sites that cater to specific communities, interests, or intentions — are growing while the one-size-fits-all mega apps are struggling. You've got apps for specific religious communities, for specific age groups, for people who love the outdoors, for people in specific professions. The market is fragmenting, and I think that's genuinely good for people looking for connection.
The reason niche works is the same reason a good local pub works better than a massive nightclub. In the nightclub, there are hundreds of people but you can't hear anyone, you can't find anyone who's on the same wavelength as you, and the whole experience is overwhelming and exhausting. In the local pub, there are fewer people but you can actually have a conversation, you probably have something in common with at least some of the other regulars, and the vibe is just better. That's what this kind of platform feels like compared to Tinder. Fewer people, but better conversations and more aligned expectations. I'll take that trade every single time.
What I find interesting is that the big apps seem to know this is happening but they can't do anything about it. Tinder has tried launching features to compete with niche apps — the "Explore" section, the "Festival Mode," all these gimmicks — but they feel exactly like what they are: bolt-on features from a company desperately trying to stay relevant. You can't graft niche appeal onto a mass-market product. It doesn't work. Niche appeal comes from being niche, from making deliberate choices about who you're serving and committing to serving them well. Kommons made that choice by focusing exclusively on the UK and on casual dating, and that commitment is exactly what makes it work.
Being UK-Only Is Actually an Advantage
I want to dwell on this point a bit more because I think people underestimate how much it matters. When a dating app is UK-only, it can do things that a global app simply can't. The moderation team understands British culture and communication styles. They can spot when someone's being passive-aggressive versus genuinely rude, they understand context-dependent humour, they can tell the difference between banter and harassment. Try explaining that nuance to a moderation team based in the Philippines handling reports from forty different countries. It's not their fault they don't get it — it's just an impossible task.
Being UK-focused also means the feature development is driven by what British users actually need, not what the American market demands. I've lost count of the number of times I've seen a big app launch a new feature that was clearly designed for how Americans date and is completely irrelevant to how we do things here. Video call dates, for instance, became a huge push during Covid — and while they work fine in American dating culture where people are comfortable with that sort of thing, most British people I know would rather walk across hot coals than do a video call with a stranger they fancy. The platform doesn't waste time on features like that because they actually understand their user base. The features they do build are practical and relevant to how dating works in British cities, and that focus makes the whole app feel more thoughtful and considered.
No Games, No Manipulation
One of the things that drove me off the big apps was the increasingly manipulative design. I'm talking about things like artificially limiting your daily likes to create scarcity, showing you a blurred grid of people who've supposedly liked you that you can only see if you pay, sending push notifications saying "someone liked you!" when actually nobody has and they just want you to open the app. These are dark patterns — design choices made to exploit your psychology and keep you coming back, not to help you find what you're looking for. Every time Tinder sent me a notification at eleven o'clock at night telling me I was "on fire" with new likes, I felt manipulated. Because I was being manipulated.
This app doesn't do any of that stuff, and I notice its absence every time I use it. There are no artificial limits designed to frustrate you into paying. There's no blurred grid of mystery admirers dangled in front of you. The notifications are relevant and useful rather than psychologically manipulative. It's amazing how much better a dating app feels when it's actually designed to help you rather than designed to extract money from you. I know that sounds like basic decency rather than something worth praising, but when every other app in the market is playing these games, basic decency becomes genuinely noteworthy.
Where I Think This Is All Heading
I'm not going to pretend I can predict the future of the dating app market with any certainty. But based on what I'm seeing right now — from my own experience, from the people around me, and from the general direction of the conversation about dating apps in the UK — I think we're heading toward a world where the giant apps become increasingly irrelevant and smaller, more intentional platforms take their place. Not one platform to replace them all, but a collection of focused apps that each serve a specific community or need really well. One app for casual dating in the UK. Another for kink and polyamory. Thursday for in-person events. Whatever else comes along next. The era of one app trying to be everything to everyone is ending, and good riddance to it.
What gives me confidence that Kommons specifically will keep growing is that it's built on something real: a genuine understanding of what its users want and a willingness to focus on delivering that without trying to be anything else. That kind of clarity is rare in tech, where the pressure is always to expand, to add features, to chase the next market. The team has resisted that pressure so far, and that discipline is exactly why it works. It's an app that knows what it is, and in a market full of apps that have lost their identity, that's the most valuable thing you can be.
I'm genuinely optimistic about where dating apps are headed, which is not something I thought I'd be saying a couple of years ago when I was burned out on the whole concept. The big apps made online dating feel like a chore. Platforms like Kommons are making it feel like a choice — an enjoyable, honest, low-pressure choice. And that shift, from obligation to genuine enjoyment, is why people are leaving the apps that treat them like data points and moving to the ones that treat them like people. Long may it continue.