A London Dating App Killed Itself to Go All-In on Real Life. Tinder Just Copied the Homework.
Let's start with the London startup that saw this coming before Tinder did.
Thursday launched in London in 2021 with a genuinely strange premise: the app only worked one day a week. Matches, messages, everything reset to zero at midnight, forcing people to actually meet up instead of letting a conversation drift for months. It built real momentum, expanding into 26 cities across six countries and racking up close to a million downloads. Then, in early 2025, its founders did something almost no dating app has ever done. They killed it.
Co-founder Matthew McNeill Love announced the shutdown of Thursday's actual swiping app on LinkedIn, explaining that with consumer interest in dating apps declining so fast, the company was doubling down on what it had come to believe was simply true: meeting people in the real world works better than meeting them online, full stop. Thursday didn't pivot to fix its app. It walked away from the swiping model entirely and rebuilt itself as Thursday Events, an IRL-only dating brand now running ticketed singles events in more than 100 cities worldwide.
That happened more than a year before Tinder's own earnings call.
Tinder is now trying to build what a London startup already proved
Match Group, Tinder's parent company, told investors this year that its growth strategy barely involves the swiping product anymore. Tinder's direct revenue came in at $457 million for the quarter, down slightly year over year, with monthly active users down 7%, the slowest decline the company has posted in over two and a half years, but a decline nonetheless. Its answer was Events, an in-app feature surfacing real, in-person activities so singles could meet through something shared instead of another endless message thread. In the original Los Angeles pilot, 71% of users aged 18 to 24 engaged with it, and just over half returned the following week. Tinder is racing to expand the feature to 26 cities by the end of this month and 75 by year's end, concentrated so far in the US and a handful of European cities, with no confirmed date yet for London.
Read Thursday's shutdown announcement next to Tinder's own investor call and the timeline gets almost funny. A London company built entirely around the bet that in-person meetings beat app-based ones killed its own app to prove the point. The world's biggest dating platform is now spending real engineering resources trying to bolt a smaller version of that same idea onto a swiping product that's still, at its core, a swiping product.
Where London's own dating economics make this even sharper
London's online dating market has grown into a genuinely large business, valued at roughly $398 million in 2025 with app subscriptions expected to drive most of that growth. Long working hours, hybrid schedules, and a workforce spread across a genuinely enormous, fragmented city have all made app-based introductions convenient in a way that's kept the market expanding even as user satisfaction hasn't followed. London singles have been paying more for less certainty, subscription tiers, boosts, visibility features, all selling improved odds rather than an actual outcome.
That's precisely the gap Thursday identified early, and it's the same gap London's growing matchmaking scene has been filling from the other direction. Matchmaker and relationship expert Sarah Louise Ryan has pointed to a specific pattern behind why London singles increasingly seek out expert guidance: the sheer volume of apps, conversations, and platforms the average single now juggles has created a kind of fatigue that leaves people scattered and emotionally worn down rather than actually closer to meeting someone.
The distinction that still matters
An events feature, whether it's Tinder's new tab or Thursday's ticketed meetups, solves for one specific problem: getting people in a room. It doesn't solve for whether the people in that room are actually right for each other, and London's dating fatigue was never purely about proximity. A matchmaker working the London market is doing something neither product does: vetting who's actually worth the introduction before either person shows up anywhere, drawing on real relationships and networks rather than whoever happened to buy a ticket to the same event.
Thursday proved the underlying thesis, real-world meeting beats app-based matching, is more than viral marketing copy; it's the reason the company staked its entire business on it. Tinder's own numbers now confirm the same thing at a much larger scale. What both are still missing is the part London's matchmakers have quietly specialized in for years: knowing, before the introduction happens, that the two people in that room actually belong together.
If London's dating apps have started to feel like they're selling better odds rather than a better outcome, the fix probably isn't another events tab. It's someone who's already done the work of knowing who's actually right for you.