Bumble dating app starts giving the first word back to women

Bumble, the dating app, was built on a simple premise: women make the first move. In December, The Observer revealed that Bumble had rowed back on this concept after a pressure campaign from lawyers and men’s rights activists, who argued that the product was discriminatory against men.

Now it appears Bumble is attempting to return to its founding principles – at least in some markets.

The company quietly announced this week that male app users in Mexico will no longer be able to message women first, “ensuring that women remain in control of when and how chats begin”. The feature that allowed men to initiate contact, first introduced globally in April 2024 and called Opening Moves, was also removed from the app in Australia last month. Male users in the UK can still message women first, should they wish.

The repeated product changes are indicative of a company struggling to fight off competition in a crowded dating app market without its unique selling point: the “feminist” framing that once set it apart.

Bumble’s shares are down almost 96% since the company went public in February 2021.

Sources with knowledge of Bumble’s operations say the company was pushed into introducing Opening Moves to reduce its legal exposure, following a series of lawsuits and legal threats in California that argued that “make the first move” was discriminatory against men.

In a single quarter in 2023, Bumble received more than 20,000 legal demands, filed through a tactic known as mass arbitration, whereby thousands of near-identical claims land at once. Each requires an individual processing fee. In its 2023 annual report, the company estimated that the proceedings could cost the company $65.8m.

The decision to get rid of the “women first” principle might have saved legal costs in California but appears to have had a knock-on effect globally. By softening the feature that had once defined the brand, Bumble blurred the distinction between itself and rivals at a time when the dating app market was already becoming more competitive. Across the industry, users were spending less time swiping and complaining of burnout, a phenomenon widely described as “dating app fatigue”.

Bumble cut 30% of its work force in February 2024, followed by another 30% in June 2025. UK jobs were particularly affected, with the Financial Times reporting that about 160 jobs were lost in London.

Now Bumble is returning to the feature that once set it apart, starting in markets where the legal risks of doing so are lower, because US-style mass litigation is less of a threat.

It is a bid to restore trust with its users, and perhaps make the product feel distinct enough to pay for again.

Photograph by Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Vox Media