Obviously they only did it to keep users around for longer. But I do think, in a vacuum, it makes sense to alter the way a dating app works after it has an established userbase. If you want to cultivate a certain kind of user by having women make the first move, then once you cultivate those users you phase out that feature, you still keep most of the users. It’s like if Twitter worked exactly like Facebook tomorrow, you’d still have boomers on facebook and nazis on twitter for the foreseeable future.

But I’m pretty sure that due to the nature of dating, the userbase for all generic apps just becomes more homogenous over time because the apps suck and people use as many of them as possible to match, with no reason for exclusively using any specific one. Therefore, yeah, Bumble killed its only defining feature.