The dating app industry grew out of the dating websites that were prominent in the early 2010s, with Match, Plenty of Fish and Zoosk leading the way with similarly designed services for mobile. This was flipped on its head with the introduction of Tinder, and the swipe left or right feature.
What Tinder and other mobile-first dating platforms realised is mobile vastly reduced the amount of info needed to make a match, while it also increased the amount of info and the quality of it available at a glance. Mobiles offered users ways to upload photos that better represented them, while GPS enhanced location-based matching.
Since Tinder became the lead dating app on the market in 2015, several challengers have either copied the app's features or developed against it. Those developing against it include Bumble's feature of letting women message first, and Hinge having prompts that connect daters instead of simply liking photos.
There are several critical KPIs that need to be tracked in the dating app industry. Users can be very fickle, deleting an app after a few hours and even giving up on subscriptions at a high rate.
So keeping a user engaged and paying can be very rewarding for dating apps, as the subscription cost tends to be much higher than the app store average. The way these apps are structured also makes moving a user onto a subscription quite a simple process, so having them use it for longer can be rewarding later on.
We have collected benchmarks on the dating app industry. Read on below to find out more.
Key Dating App Benchmarks
- The retention rate for dating apps was 3.3% in 2024, an increase on the previous year
- Less than five percent of monthly subs to dating apps are still active 12 months later
- The conversion rate for dating apps was 20% on Google Play and 18.2% on iOS
- The activation rate for dating apps was 25% on day one and 7% by day 30
- Renewals for weekly and monthly subs are around the same, at 69% for the second renewal and 77% for the third
- Active users spent 80 minutes per day on dating apps in 2024
Dating App Report 2025
Want to learn more about the dating app industry? Our Dating App report includes app financials, market share, users, installs, demographics and industry benchmarks.
- Charts: 125
- Data Points: 1554
- Apps covered: 19
