Tinder Is Losing Subscribers Globally. In Singapore, the Government Just Confirmed the Apps Aren't Working Either.
Let's start with a government survey.
In April 2026, GovTech — Singapore's Government Technology Agency — was found to have circulated a survey about a proposed new dating service called Firstdate. The survey asked singles aged 21 to 35 about their motivations and frustrations with dating. It referenced common pain points, listed for respondents to recognise and confirm.
The first pain point on the list: "endless swiping."1
The Singapore government has been watching its citizens fail to find each other since 1984. The Social Development Unit. The SDN. The population campaigns. The baby bonuses. The ministers' suggestions about confined spaces. The SDNTrust Accreditation Framework, which ran for decades and ended in December 2022.
And now, in April 2026, GovTech is surveying singles and naming "endless swiping" as one of the things they're trying to design around.
The government of Singapore has officially acknowledged that dating apps are part of the problem.
The Numbers That Made This Inevitable
Singapore's resident total fertility rate fell to 0.87 in 2025 — a historic low, down from 0.97 the year before, and one of the lowest figures recorded anywhere in the world.1 In 2024, there were 22,955 citizen marriages — a 5.7% decline from 2023.2
The proportion of singles is rising across every age group. The apps have been available throughout. The connection between those two facts is the one the GovTech survey was trying to address.
Here is what the data actually shows about Singapore and dating apps.
24% of Singapore residents have used a dating app — but 76% have never used one, according to YouGov surveys.3 Among singles who are open to a relationship but haven't used apps, 60% say they're unlikely to try one in the future, and 29% say they would never use one.3
The most common reason for avoiding apps: preferring to meet people in person.3
Among the quarter of Singaporeans who do use apps, the dominant platform is Tinder — used by 59% of app users — followed by Coffee Meets Bagel at 46%, and OkCupid and Bumble at 34% each.3
Now here is the specific Singapore mismatch that the apps have never solved.
Coffee Meets Bagel's December 2025 Dating Realness Report — a survey of 1,076 Singapore daters aged 21 to 35 — found that 94% of Singapore daters are seeking marriage or a long-term partner. Of those, 64% specifically want to find someone to marry.4
And Tinder — used by the largest share of Singapore's app daters — has 39% casual daters looking for hookups or short-term connections.3
The most used app in Singapore is misaligned with what the vast majority of Singapore daters actually want. The government has been watching the fertility rate fall for four decades. And "endless swiping" just made a government survey's pain point list.
What The SDNTrust Ending Actually Meant
Here is the context that makes Singapore's app moment uniquely its own.
The SDNTrust Accreditation Framework — the government's mechanism for accrediting and supporting private matchmaking agencies — officially ended on 31 December 2022.2 This marked the formal conclusion of decades of institutional infrastructure around government-assisted matchmaking. The SDU, founded in 1984, had evolved into the SDN (Social Development Network), which had accredited dozens of dating agencies and social programmes, all operating under the logic that Singaporeans needed structured help meeting each other.
As Kopi Date — a Singapore-born alternative to apps — put it plainly: "The fall of SDN is as inevitable as Singapore's declining fertility rate. Despite years of government-backed campaigns, financial incentives, and policy tweaks, Singapore's birth rate continues to fall."2
The end of SDNTrust was not a victory for the apps. It was a recognition that the institutional framework had run its course and that something else needed to fill the space. What filled the space, broadly, was Tinder.
Tinder did not fix the fertility rate.
The Globally Collapsing Industry Behind The Local Problem
Globally, the dating app market posted its first annual revenue decline in 2025 — falling 1.7% to $6 billion.5 Tinder's paying users fell 8% year-over-year. Bumble's revenue dropped nearly 10%.5 Match Group cut 13% of its workforce and launched an emergency turnaround plan named "Reset, Revitalize, Resurgence."
App installs globally declined 4% in 2025. Sessions fell 7%.6 78% of dating app users report burnout from swiping, matching, and being ghosted.7 Two-thirds of current app users say they want to meet people in person instead.8
None of this is happening separately from Singapore. Singapore's market is part of the same global pattern — but with a specific intensification. In a city-state of 733 square kilometres, with a population of 6.11 million and a government that tracks the fertility rate quarterly, the failure of the apps to produce marriages is not a background data point. It is a national policy problem.
GovTech's April 2026 survey wasn't a casual market research exercise. It was a government agency asking whether they should build a new product because the existing products aren't working. The pain points they named — "endless swiping" and "awkward singles events" — are the two things that have defined Singapore's official and unofficial attempts to get people together for the past forty years.1
First it was the SDU's singles cruises and tea dances. Then it was the apps. Both have produced the same result.
The 41-Hour Work Week Problem
Here is the specific Singapore structural obstacle that the apps have never addressed.
Employed residents in Singapore worked an average of 41.4 hours per week in 2025 — still among the highest in Asia, and among the highest anywhere.9 The professional culture in the financial sector, in the tech firms along one-north, in the law firms and consultancies of the CBD — it does not create abundant energy for the slow, inefficient, occasionally embarrassing work of organic human connection.
Dating apps gained traction in Singapore precisely because they promised efficiency. Forty-one hours of work a week and another ten in commute and personal obligations leaves limited time for meeting people the long way. The apps compressed the front end of the process. You could match on your lunch break, exchange a few messages on the MRT, and arrive at a first date having skipped the weeks of casual proximity that used to precede one.
The problem: the apps compressed the front end and left the back end entirely intact. The first date still requires showing up. The connection still requires time and vulnerability. The relationship still requires investment that a 41-hour work week doesn't automatically accommodate.
Coffee Meets Bagel's CMB noted in its 2025 report that Singapore daters ranked emotional connection and shared values as their top partner qualities — ahead of physical attractiveness.4 Yet the design of most apps prioritises the photo over everything else. The most important thing Singapore daters say they're looking for is the thing the dominant app interface is worst at surfacing.
What's Filling the Space
Something specific is happening in Singapore's dating landscape that is worth naming precisely.
Kopi Date — founded in Singapore, operating entirely outside the app model — curates thoughtful 1:1 coffee dates at unique spaces across the city-state. Tiong Bahru bakeries. East Coast Park walks. Haji Lane cafés. The name itself is the argument: kopi (coffee) is how Singaporeans have always built relationships — slowly, over a table, in a familiar space. Kopi Date's Walk & Talk series takes members off the beaten path around Singapore on shared trails.2
The contrast with swiping is entirely intentional. Kopi Date explicitly describes itself as a "humanised experience" and positions against both apps and traditional matchmaking agencies. It skipped the SDNTrust era entirely.
Thursday™ — the global events platform that runs IRL dating events weekly — is active in Singapore, hosting bar takeovers and curated social events.10 Secret RSVP runs live-matched singles events and describes itself as hosting "the world's first live-matched Singapore singles events."11
Meet Me In The Middle — a monthly event held at Middle Child Wine Bar — is specifically structured for Singaporeans who want to meet through the pitch-your-friend format: bring a single friend, make the case for them, let the room decide.12 It is the opposite of swiping in every possible sense.
Run with Love runs monthly group runs with a personal trainer, specifically for singles.12 In a city where the outdoor running scene — around the Botanic Gardens, along Labrador Park, on the Southern Ridges — has always been one of the most reliable organic social venues, the formalisation of running as a dating mechanism is both unexpected and entirely logical.
Lunch Actually — one of Southeast Asia's largest matchmaking agencies, headquartered in Singapore — has facilitated 160,000 first dates over its history.12 Its CEO has been publicly specific about the problem with apps: they can generate matches but not accountability. The matchmaking model requires both parties to show up.
The Specific Singapore Irony
Here is the thing about Singapore's app moment that is uniquely, specifically ironic.
The government has spent forty years trying to help Singaporeans find each other through institutional means. The SDU. The SDN. The accreditation frameworks. The singles cruises. The supermarket mixer in the 1990s. And throughout all of it, the government's fundamental instinct was correct: Singaporeans do want to meet someone. The majority want marriage. The fertility rate data confirms they're not meeting enough of the right people often enough.
The apps promised to solve this at scale. They offered efficiency, reach, and a self-service model that didn't require government involvement. They were downloaded by millions. Tinder became the most used dating app. Coffee Meets Bagel became the most trusted one for serious daters.
And Singapore's fertility rate fell from 0.97 to 0.87 in a single year.
The apps did not solve the problem the government has been trying to solve for four decades. What they did was replace one set of awkward institutional mechanisms with a different set of awkward digital ones, while the underlying issue — that Singaporeans work too many hours, live in too-small apartments, and need genuine community infrastructure to meet each other meaningfully — remained entirely unaddressed.
GovTech's April 2026 survey named "endless swiping" as a pain point. This is the government rediscovering what the SDU was trying to address in 1984. Forty-two years later. Different technology. Same fundamental observation.
What The Room Does That The App Cannot
In a city-state of 733 square kilometres, every venue is local. There is no cross-harbour commute, no inter-suburb logistics problem, no geographic fragmentation like Sydney or Phoenix. The entire country is one walkable, MRT-accessible ecosystem.
This is Singapore's specific advantage in the shift from apps to in-person events. The barrier to showing up is lower here than in almost any city in this series. The distance to a Kopi Date at Tiong Bahru or a Walk & Talk along MacRitchie is trivial. The social accountability — in a country where everyone is two degrees from everyone else, where professional networks are dense and overlapping, where showing up somewhere as yourself has genuine social weight — is higher than in large, anonymous cities.
The apps removed that accountability. They offered the anonymity of a chat window in a city-state that is specifically not anonymous. You could ghost in Singapore and then encounter the person at the same industry event the following week. The apps enabled a behaviour that the social fabric of Singapore was not designed to support.
The room brings it back. The 1:1 kopi date. The matched event at a Holland Village bar. The run along the Southern Ridges where conversation has to sustain itself for an hour at a walking pace.
These are not nostalgia. They are the social mechanisms that actually work in a city this small, this dense, and this specifically focused on what the Coffee Meets Bagel data confirmed: 94% of Singapore daters want something real.
The apps were never designed to deliver real. They were designed to deliver options.
Singapore has had enough options.
At Luvo, we've always known that real requires a different kind of introduction. The government has been trying to solve this for forty years. We'll make the match. You bring the intention to actually show up.
Sources:
Footnotes
Must Share News, "GovTech Proposes Under-35 Dating Service with Singpass Verification & First Free Meal," May 2026; Singapore CNA, GovTech Firstdate survey coverage, April–May 2026 ↩ ↩2 ↩3
Kopi Date, "SDNTrust Ended in Singapore: What It Means for Dating in 2026," including May 2026 update ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4
YouGov Singapore, "Match, Chat, Love: Examining the Popularity and Usage of Dating Apps in Singapore," via Campaign Asia, February 2024 ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5
Coffee Meets Bagel, "Dating Realness Report 2025," December 2025, N=1,076 Singapore respondents aged 21–35 ↩ ↩2
Business of Apps, "Annual Dating App Market Revenues Decline for First Time," April 2026 ↩ ↩2
Adjust, "The State of Dating Apps 2026," January 2026 ↩
Forbes Health / OnePoll survey of 1,000 U.S. dating app users, 2024; Forbes Health, "78% of Gen Z Report Dating App Burnout," July 2025 ↩
Elevated Magazines, "Why Dating Apps Are Losing Users in 2025," August 2025 ↩
Onluxy, "7 Best Dating Apps in Singapore: Find Meaningful Relationships (2026)," citing Ministry of Manpower 2025 parliamentary reply ↩
Thursday™ Singapore events listings, events.getthursday.com/singapore ↩
Secret RSVP, srsvp.com/singapore-singles-events ↩
The Honeycombers Singapore, "Dating Apps and Events in Singapore," September 2025, citing Kopi Date Walk & Talk, Run with Love, Meet Me In The Middle, Lunch Actually ↩ ↩2 ↩3