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Lockdown isn’t fun for the majority of people, but it’s even worse if you live alone. If you can’t do your usual job and you’re not allowed to go out of the house, it won’t take long before you begin to feel lonely and disconnected from the world. Perhaps because of that, dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are seeing a huge upsurge in use at the moment. It seems that people aren’t just using the apps in the hope of finding love – many of them just want to find people to connect and socialize with while they can’t speak to anybody in the real world.
Having noted the trend, Bumble has decided to change its approach and make it easier for it to connect with each other. The app has always been easy to distinguish from Tinder because of the way it provides matches, and how it allows matched people to interact. Tinder sometimes gets criticized because it approaches making matches the same way many people approach the games on online slots websites. You might enjoy playing Cleopatra mobile slot if you venture back a few hundred centuries back to ancient Egypt. You keep on swiping right if you want to make as many matches as possible on Tinder, just as you keep hitting the ‘spin’ button if you want to win money on online slots. The method works the same way in the dating app as it does in online slots – it doesn’t guarantee you success, but the ‘rapid-fire’ approach speeds up your next positive result.
Bumble has never operated that way. For a start, there’s only one way a conversation can begin on Bumble, and that’s when a woman wants to talk to the man she’s just matched with. Women have to speak first, or the conversation never starts at all. The idea behind this is a sound one – it keeps women safe from bad one-liners or unsolicited pictures, and so it’s supposed to encourage a better standard of matching and dating. The second drastic difference is that Bumble has always historically limited the geographical range between two people who have matched together to fifty miles. If you live further apart than that, then it doesn’t matter how well-matched you might appear to be – Bumble just won’t put you together. That rule – for now, at least – is going out of the window.
Bumble users who want to take advantage of this new relaxation in the rules will have to make a manual adjustment in order to do so. If you’re a Bumble user, open up your app settings and look for the location criteria. Change it to ‘nationwide’ – an option that didn’t exist at all until the last week – and you should suddenly find a whole new world of possible matches opens up to you. This probably isn’t practical from a dating point of view – if you’re separated from a potential partner by hundreds of miles it doesn’t give you a great chance of getting a relationship off the ground – but it does allow you more chance to speak to people with similar interests to you during these difficult times.
The designers of the app aren’t just offering people the opportunity to conduct more virtual dates – they’re actively encouraging their users to get involved in doing so. As of this week, you can now add a new badge to your profile tat indicates that you’re available for ‘virtual dates’ – meaning you’re willing to speak to someone via the medium of a video call. Every time someone adds the badge to their profile, Bumble donate one dollar to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 fund. Not only are you potentially providing a lifeline to a potentially socially isolated new friend during quarantine, but you’re also helping a good cause. When it’s put like that, it’s almost rude not to take advantage of the feature!
While this is quite a significant new development for Bumble, it’s not the only change they’ve made in response to the ongoing global pandemic. If you’re the sort of person who communicates better with the spoken word than you do with the written word, you can now send voice notes to each other. This isn’t a huge development considering that the app already offers both video and voice calling as standard, but it might be a handy addition for people who want to respond to a message while they’re on the move and don’t have both hands free to type.
As Bumble is an app that was designed to help people find love, perhaps it isn’t a surprise to find that they’re doing as much as they can to share the love as widely as possible during the coronavirus crisis. In the United Kingdom, the company has recently announced that it’s making one hundred and fifty grants available to small businesses who are struggling with costs in the wake of the virus-induced downturn in trade. The grants are only small at five thousand pounds (the equivalent of roughly $6,300), but for some of the country’s smallest businesses and sole traders, it could be the difference between still being able to trade when the crisis is over, or having to shut their doors forever. Companies can’t apply for the grants directly – they have to be nominated by the app’s users, and Bumble will then identify the 150 most deserving recipients before handing out the grants. It started the process in March and hopes to be able to pay the grants out before the end of April.
The world has never been through anything like this before in living memory, and it’s important that every individual and every company does as much as it can to make things easier for everybody else until things can go back to normal. The changes Bumble has made might not be groundbreaking, but they do offer people a better chance to socialize and stay connected to the world around them when it might not otherwise have been possible to do so. Single people will always have a reason to use Bumble, Tinder, and other similar dating apps. For now, though, you don’t have to be single to use Bumble – you just have to be willing to speak to strangers who might live a little further afield than you’re used to. Consider it a way of expanding your horizons!
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