I love the idea of dating apps.

You are exposed to such a great and infinite pool of potential partners that you would not be able to get in real life, especially in SF Bay Area. Which changes the problem from - how to meet someone, to a better problem - how to filter out those that you definitely do not want to meet.

Even more, it is not replacing your real life meetups but compliments them.

My issue with dating apps is that the number of matches is large and all of them are very similar, hence the challenge is how to filter properly.

As many people here, I love 10 year old version of OKCupid where you needed to fill a lot of information, answer questions and invest in the profile in general.

Even if we forget about this extra information, fact that person invested in filling the profile told me that she was serious about meeting someone which is a strong signal in itself.

I believe that online dating industry is a great achievement of the humanity as it drastically expanded our choice of partners, but existing implementation is waiting for the disruption.

Personally, I would love if dating apps added:

1. Tags for conversations, similar to labels in gmail.

2. Ability to search - when you have hundreds of conversations, it is hard to find one that you are interested in.

3. Option to add more information to profile, say I loved questions at OKCupid.

4. Id and age verification. Feels like every second lady lies about her age. (One my female friend who is 49, uses 36 in online dating. I do not think that such a difference is that common, but still)

5. Somehow force people to use photos that are less than a year old. Very unpleasant come to a date and meet a girl that is not even close to be as fit as she is in her pictures. They are also very surprised when you do not go on a second date and, I suspect, complain to their girlfriends that "online dating is not working for them". I do not blame them - misleading with photos is so common -> she needs to mislead to be in that competitive market (I was told that men lie about their height as well). I believe this could be addressed or at least mitigated on the platform level. (Being fair - having video chat before the date helps to address this issue to some extent)

6. Showing stats. Communication, flirting, building comfort in online dating is a special skill, quite different from doing the same in real life:

[6a] It is happening in asynchronous way

[6b] Information channels are limited - you do not have voice, intonations, appearance, body language, face expressions, in the beginning it is just text

[6c] As conversation may be stalled or end at any moment both sides increase odds by having many conversations happening at the same time.

these limitations change everything and force to learn new communication skills from scratch.

If we were shown metrics like: yours and average in your geography and age range stats for open rate, reply rate, length of the conversation, number of matches, number and percent of conversations that lead to a meeting (Hinge these days asks if you met in person.), etc it would help people see what their limitations are and focus on addressing them - same as in sales as sales and online dating are similar in many ways.