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When Tinder, a mobile dating app, launched on college campuses in America in 2012, it quickly became a hit. Although online dating had been around since Match.com, a website for lonely hearts, launched in 1995, it had long struggled to shed an image of desperation. But Tinder, by letting users sift through photos of countless potential dates with a simple swipe, made it easy and fun. Soon, Tinder and its rivals had transformed courtship. A report published in 2023 by the Pew Research Centre found that 30 per cent of American adults had used an online dating service, including more than half of those aged between 18 and 29. One in five couples of that age had met through such a service. Usage surged during the pandemic, as lonely locked-down singles sought out partners. The market capitalisation of Bumble, a rival to Tinder, surged to US$13 billion (S$17.2 billion) on its first day of trading in February 2021. Later that year the value of Match Group, which owns Tinder, Hinge, and scores of other dating services, reached nearly US$50 billion. Today roughly 350 million people around the world have a dating app on their phone, up from 250 million in 2018, according to Business of Apps, a research firm. In June, Tokyo’s government even said it would launch a matchmaking app of its own to pair up singles in the city.