I tried eleven dating apps. Here is what each one is for

It is 11pm on a Wednesday in a bar on King Street Newtown that smells like spilt Negroni and rain on the awning, and I have been on Hinge for forty-three minutes without saying anything to anyone. I keep opening the app, looking at the same six prompts, closing it, opening it again. My friend Jess, who has been cackling at her own phone the entire time, leans over and says, “you’ve got that face on. The ‘I’m doing research’ face.”

I am doing research. Sort of.

Eleven apps deep into the year, by a generous count, including a brief regretted return to Tinder over Easter that I will not be elaborating on. The thing I have noticed is that the apps themselves are not really the problem. The problem is we keep using them like they are the same product. They are not. Each one is engineered to do one specific thing well, and most of the fatigue I hear about — the kind that 78 per cent of dating-app users now report as outright emotional exhaustion in the YouGov data — comes from being on the wrong app for what you actually want.

So here is the year, broken open, app by app.

The one I have not deleted is Hinge. YouGov’s 2024 Australian dating-app survey put Hinge users at 71 per cent hoping for an exclusive relationship and 53 per cent looking for a spouse, the highest numbers of any app on the list, and that does track. People are answering the prompts as if a person will read them, which they will. The voice prompts, which Hinge added a couple of years back, have changed how matches go for me. Hearing someone laugh halfway through a sentence about their dog bypasses the usual paragraph of polite filler. Hinge says profiles with voice prompts are 32 per cent more likely to lead to a date. I cannot prove the number. Anecdotally, sure.

Bumble is going through it commercially. Paying users dropped 16 per cent last financial year. The Match Group portfolio (Tinder, Hinge, OkCupid) shed 5 per cent of theirs over the same window. People are voting with their wallets. The women-message-first thing genuinely does change the texture of the match queue. I came back to it earlier this year after a long break and the volume of replies was lower but the conversations were better, which is the trade you want.

Tinder I keep installed for travel, almost nothing else. 75 million monthly users globally, roughly the population of every Australian capital city combined, 56 per cent of the Australian users on it looking for something casual. Long weekend in Hobart, fine. Bali for a friend’s wedding, fine. Home in your own city hoping to meet someone for slow Sunday lunches at Continental Deli — you are using a chainsaw on a wedding cake.

Feeld is the one I would tell you about if we were having a wine. Started as a kink-and-poly app, still its core, but the actual superpower is that it filters for a kind of frankness from the first message. People put what they want into the field where other apps put their job title. I am not poly. I have had the most genuinely interesting messaging on Feeld of any app, mostly because everyone there has gone through the small social effort of deciding to be there. A barista in Marrickville sent me a fifteen-paragraph essay on a Thursday about the way her last relationship ended, then asked what I thought, and I wrote back, and we got dinner three weeks later in a wine bar in Enmore where the lights were too low and we both ordered the same thing on accident. Nothing happened after that, in the way nothing usually happens. Not for everybody, this app. If reading “ENM” in a bio makes your eyes glaze, skip.

OkCupid I recommend constantly to twenty-something friends who cannot stand the swiping rhythm of everywhere else. The questionnaires, the long-form profiles, the keyword search. It is the slowest app on the list. Also one of the only mainstream ones still genuinely useful for queer dating, and arguably the best on the market for filtering out a person whose politics will be a problem by week two.

eHarmony is funny. I have not personally been on it since I was twenty-six. Every over-forty friend who has settled down in the last few years has settled down through eHarmony, which was either embarrassing or low-key impressive depending on how I was feeling that week when I heard it. The compatibility quiz takes the better part of an hour. Most of us will never finish it. The people who do tend to come out the other side married, which I am told is the point.

Coffee Meets Bagel ran me a small set of curated profiles each morning and then closed itself for the day, which is the entire pitch and the entire app. For a stretch in winter it was a kind of small mercy. I would look at the picks over an oat flat white at the bakery near my place, decide on nobody, and that was the full transaction.

Happn I bailed on. It surfaces people you have apparently crossed paths with around the city, which sounds romantic and in practice meant the algorithm kept handing me the same man from my Bondi gym for a fortnight straight. A friend in Brunswick swears by Happn for the exact same reason I left. Different city, different match pool, different vibe.

The most interesting apps in 2026 are the ones built as a direct rebuke to the swipe. Thursday is only open on Thursdays. The rest of the week the app is dead and you cannot get in. Then on Thursday it lights up and everyone is in a hurry to actually meet because by midnight the matches expire and you start over the next week. It works, in the way arbitrary deadlines work.

Raya has not invited me. I cannot tell you anything about it directly. A friend who is on it described it to me at brunch as “Instagram with a queue”, and I have thought about that phrase more than is reasonable.

Bristlr, the indie UK-and-Australia app for people who love beards or have one, I am including not because anyone strictly needs it but because it is the kind of app that makes me think the future of this whole industry might be small and specific. The big apps are tired. They are.

Here is the part that does not make sense, by the way. Hinge revenue grew 26 per cent in Q4 last year, in the middle of all this. And every dating coach my For You page can find is telling people to delete the apps and meet someone in real life. Both things are happening at once. Far as I can tell, people are using fewer apps, harder, and committing to one. The total surface area is shrinking and the engagement on the ones people do keep is going up.

So if you forced me to give a year-end take, here is what I would say to my friends, after a couple of glasses of something: pick maybe two. One that you are taking seriously. One that you are not. Delete the rest, including the one you have been keeping “just in case” for eighteen months. You know the one.

Next time you are in a bar at 11pm staring at the queue of strangers in your phone, just put the phone face-down on the bar for ten minutes. There is nearly always a reason to.