Today, dating app Hinge is launching a new feature to skip over the talking phase: Date Ideas.
With Date Ideas, users can share their intention to go out and meet in-person. When updating one's profile, a user can select three Date Idea options, including writing their own. Think: drinks, seeing a movie, taking a walk, going on a picnic, and the like.
Then, if a potential match is viewing a profile with set Date Ideas, they can pick one and select when they're free from a drop-down menu. This doesn't automatically schedule a date (there's no integration with Hinge and Google Calendar...yet, anyway), but the intention of getting off the app is already there if they match.
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Credit: Hinge
Date Ideas is the latest feature Hinge added to make it a little easier to meet and chat with someone instead of "liking" endlessly. In Dec., Hinge added AI-driven Convo Starters to avoid a lackluster first message. And last Feb., Hinge added Match Note, a private way daters can let someone know something intimate about them that may be difficult to bring up but they want them to know right away (f.e., that they're sober).
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Every feature Hinge designs is built around the metric of getting people to meet in real life, Hinge's Chief Product and Technology Officer, Ben Celebicic, told Mashable. So, every feature starts with a challenge that daters feel.
"In this specific case, the core challenge we heard was that they match, they feel super excited about matching with someone, but then they get stuck in a messaging state and never make a plan," he said. The dreaded pen pal trap.
The app's research team, Hinge Labs, found that 79 percent of daters want to skip small talk and just plan a date, according to a March 2026 survey of 700 respondents. "So that's how this idea was born," Celebicic said.
Looking broadly at Hinge's plan for 2026, Celebicic said the team wants to stay attuned with what Gen Z wants. It seems that whatever Hinge is doing is working, seeing as its direct revenue and paying users have soared year-over-year both last year and the year before.
Tinder, meanwhile, is declining in both metrics. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Spencer Rascoff — CEO of both Tinder and Match Group, Tinder and Hinge's parent company — said they want more women to use Tinder, and to increase the overall user base of the app.