For more than two years, it’s been clear that something at Bumble wasn’t working. As the dating app lost users—in a more accelerated way than its also-struggling competitors—it has been trying to figure out what today’s daters want from the app that rose to fame with its pledge that “women make the first move.”
Yesterday, the app announced that it’s officially doing away with that longtime product feature. Any user, man or woman, can now send the opening message in a heterosexual match on Bumble. Founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who took the company public in 2021, left, and then returned as CEO in early 2025, told Bloomberg that the change was “not a reversal of our principles or our DNA or our original mission.” Instead, it reflects what users expect today.
Indeed, this change has been a long time coming. In March 2024, I broke the news that Bumble’s then-CEO Lidiane Jones was considering rolling back the requirement that women send the first message on the app. “It feels like a burden for a subset of our users,” she told me at the time. Two months later, the app introduced what it called “opening moves”—a way for men to not quite fully start the conversation, but choose pre-selected questions to nudge it forward. Two years later, Bumble is now going all the way and fully eliminating its gender-specific conversation-starter rules.
