Bumble is preparing to let men make the first move, a change that unpicks the single rule the dating app was built around.
According to Bloomberg a coming messaging update will let men open conversations in opposite-sex matches, though the exact mechanics are still emerging and Bumble has not spelled them out in full.
For anyone who has used the app, the significance is hard to overstate. Since launch, Bumble worked on one deceptively simple principle: in heterosexual matches only women could send the first message, an inversion that was pitched less as a product quirk than as a small act of rebalancing.
That premise is exactly what the company is now walking back.
When the female-friendly app first expanded beyond the US, founder and chief executive Whitney Wolfe Herd built its identity on the idea that women should set the terms of a conversation, a feminist framing that neatly distinguished Bumble from a field of near-identical swipe apps.
