Bumble to remove swipe feature in upcoming app overhaul

Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd confirmed that the company will remove the swipe feature, which serves as the core interaction mechanism of the dating app. Speaking in an interview with Axios on Thursday, Wolfe Herd announced that the company is planning to overhaul its app later this year, marking a shift away from the mechanism that has defined consumer dating applications. “We are going to be saying goodbye to the swipe and hello to something that I believe is revolutionary for the category,” Wolfe Herd said, signaling a redesign of the platform’s user experience. The planned overhaul of the app comes after several quarters of declining paid user numbers.

The decision to phase out the swipe feature follows a period of declining paid user numbers. During a quarterly earnings call this week, the company reported that its paid users fell about 21% in the first quarter to 3.2 million, down from 4 million last year. Wolfe Herd framed this decline as a choice rather than a loss. She described the past few quarters as a period of real transformation for the company, explaining that Bumble executed a deliberate reset of its member base. According to Wolfe Herd, the company made a clear choice to prioritize quality over quantity by focusing on well-intentioned, engaged members. She noted that while this decision reduced the overall scale of the platform, it meaningfully improved the health of the ecosystem.

While the app overhaul is not expected to launch until the last quarter of this year, the company is already developing technologies to define its future direction. Specifically, Bumble is developing an AI dating assistant named Bee to help define this new direction. This development aligns with the company’s strategy to integrate artificial intelligence into the user experience, shifting the platform’s utility from manual swiping to AI-assisted matchmaking. Until the overhaul launches in the last quarter of this year, users will continue to use the swiping mechanism on the app.

Why it matters

Bumble’s move to abandon its defining feature signals a pivot to reverse a significant decline in paid subscribers, with the company betting on an AI-driven future to regain market relevance.