Dating Apps

Online Dating Applications, or Dating Apps, are web-hosted dating services accessible as a mobile phone application. They often take advantage of the mobile phone's many affordances, such as a smartphone's GPS location capabilities, on-hand presence, and the accessibility to other applications such as photos or videos hosted on the phone.

Dating applications today increase the frequency with which traditional dating takes place, introducing individuals to a variety of possible matches based on characteristics such as location, possible interests or hobbies, and even religious or ethnic preferences. They allow a user to seek potential new relationships with as little or as much effort as they are willing to put in.

History of Online Dating Applications

The use of technology to engage in dating practices is not a new phenomenon, having originated in the late 1950s. Operation Match is considered to be the first dating service to incorporate the use of a computer. Launched in 1965, Operation Match utilized the IBM 7090 computer to algorithmically create matches based on responses collected via paper questionnaires. Created by students at Harvard University, Operation Match remained a service to help college students find dates rather than foster relationships that could potentially lead to marriage.

In the late 1970s, services that allowed video dating began to rise. In 1995, the popular dating service match.com launched and was soon followed by other competitors such as eharmony.com, Ashley Madison, and OKCupid. However, it was not until 2009 that dating became accessible via a mobile phone application. Grindr became the inaugural mobile-first platform by providing a location based dating app geared towards homosexual men. In 2012, Tinder was founded by a startup incubator Hatch Labs and the dating "swipe" became increasingly popular. By 2013, Tinder was processing over 350 million swipes per day and over 1 billion swipes per day by 2014. Other popular dating applications such as JSwipe and Bumble, which requires women to initiate conversations, also launched in 2014. In 2018, it was estimated that nearly 23.8 million adults utilized a dating app of some kind.

Affordances of Dating Applications

Many scholars of dating applications have cited that mobility, proximity, immediacy, and visual dominance differentiate dating applications from online dating websites. Because dating applications are accessible via a smartphone, users are able to utilize the app at any point in time from any location, thereby increasing the mobility as well as the accessibility of utilizing a dating service. While online dating sites provide possible matches by examining the general region of the user, a dating application narrows the scope much further and often returns possible matches within the same vicinity, thereby increasing a user's proximity to a potential match. Dating applications are also more visually driven compared to online dating websites, as images of a potential match take up a sizable portion of a phone screen rather than on a larger screen such as a computer.

As forms of computer-mediated communication, dating applications also portray many of the affordances of social network sites. Presentation flexibility, the extent to which a platform affords the ability to engage in self-presentation through a variety of styles, is particularly noted on dating applications. On Bumble, a user has the ability to not only upload photos of their choosing, they are also provided text-boxes to create a short 'bio' and are provided with a variety of structured profile fields that allow a user to disclose any additional information about them, ranging from their religious/ethnic preferences to their smoking/drinking habits and political views. Content and Identity persistence are also key affordances of dating applications as any information a user chooses to disclose remains associated with that user until they choose to change it. Dating applications allow the user to be linked to a stable online identity, greatly reducing anonymity as well as the tendency to create temporary accounts.