The Pros and Cons of Bumble

I used to think that  Bumble was the best dating app out there until I really started using it. After spending about a year using it I have uncovered some pretty bad trends while using the app. Of course this will be from a guys perspective but I have talked to countless women and can say that it’s pretty bad on their side too. In this blog post, I will break down and discuss the pros and cons of using Bumble.

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About Bumble

Bumble is a dating platform for making real connections. Bumble is a great way to find the people in your area that may just bring the energy you’re looking for! Bumble was designed to challenge outdated heterosexual dating norms. They empower women to make the first move by giving them the ability to control the conversation. Beyond women making the first move, Bumble is a dating platform to empower all users to create safe and healthy connections but is it good for you?

The Pros

Over the years I have used Bumble as have countless friends of mine with some degree of success. Bumble does a great job at weeding out the scammers. They use great tech/AI to moderate photos so trying to put a fake photo on your profile won’t get very far. I have not encountered a scammer on Bumble in the last 3 years of using it while POF you see roughly 5 a day!

Bumble uses a unique verification process to make sure users are who they say they are. This gives you a “Verified” badge on your profile. Based on what I’ve seen, most people use it. It’s hard to get it wrong. This verification photo is taken from your camera then compared to the photo you have on file. I do believe they use AI to compare the photos to ensure they are similar.

The photos of profiles are really good. They are quality photos along with great dimensions to ensure you get the best view. They also require more than 3 photos so you’re not stuck with just one profile photo when viewing people.

The Bumble app lets women make the first move. This is good because it allows the women to act on their own time and terms. However, there is a problem with this in terms of the sheer number of matches that women get and I’ll detail that in the Cons section below.

Bumble also allows you to filter out the results you don’t want to see. If you set your filter then it will only show you those results. You can weed out people who live outside your distance range as well as age range. There are advanced filters that let you weed out more.

The Cons

The Premium version of Bumble will set you back a whopping $99 dollars per month. There are discounts for purchasing more months but that’s the basic package. Not to mention what buying more Spotlights will cost you. If you want to have your profile shown to more people then you can purchase more Spotlights which show your profile in front of others for 30 minutes. A set of 30 Spotlights will cost you $79.99. So you can easily spend over $150 dollars a month on Bumble.

Lets talk about Spotlight for a second. If you have a Age and Distance filter set then don’t expect Spotlight to keep those in place. Spotlight will go well beyond your filters. In my opinion, this is just not worth it if you’re looking for people within a specific distance range.

Ghosting is where you’re talking to someone and then they vanish. Bumble does a very bad job at this. You can unmatch someone without letting them know why and I think this is bad. It sends the wrong message and can leave people with a little mental anguish. If you want to resolve this then add a pre-defined drop down allowing users to select a reason why they are unmatching the user. This could go a long way but they don’t do it.

When it comes to dating sites, on average, there are 70% men and 30% women. Now this is just an average. This is the case on Bumble. There are more men than women and while Bumble says they have about 50/50, that’s not true.

When a woman first creates her account, it’s not going to be uncommon for her to have over 300 men sitting in her match queue. These are men that have swiped right on her. She can change her filters to narrow it down but that won’t be very much. At this point women can have fatigue over the app due to the sheer numbers men. Bumble should throttle this somehow.

With the men it’s the opposite. On average, men will only have about 20 to 30 matches in their queue  which can lead men to delete the app and start over so they can get a second shot because there is no “Second Look” on Bumble.

One of the other things that drive me crazy is that there is no Distance on the Advanced Filter. So while you can set the age range for what you’re looking for, you can’t set it for those looking for you. This in my eyes weakens the site but I would imagine since Bumble is a public company they have to do things like this which in my eyes creates a negative effect or dating app fatigue.

In Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, Bumble is a great dating app but it could be way better. If you’re going to use it then be aware of this pros and cons because there’s a reason why most dating app users get mental fatigue over using these dating apps. Go in it knowing this and keep an open mind and know that you’re probably going to get ghosted and you’re going to spend a lot of money getting it.