Dating apps are facing a crisis of trust, as users increasingly question whether platforms such as Tinder, Hinge and Badoo are designed to help them find a partner or simply to keep them scrolling. A large survey conducted across Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Poland found particularly strong dissatisfaction among Swedish users.
The findings come from the Mobile App Trends Report 2026, produced by the digital product agency Framna. According to figures reported by Swedish public broadcaster SVT, dating apps received an average Net Promoter Score of −58, falling to −60 in Sweden.
Net Promoter Score, or NPS, measures whether users would recommend a product to others. Scores can range from −100 to +100. A negative result means that the number of users unlikely to recommend the service exceeds the number willing to promote it.
Dating app trust is weakest in Sweden
Framna’s wider study collected responses from approximately 13,750 users across the four countries. Around 3,800 respondents were based in Sweden. Participants were randomly selected in cooperation with the market research company Norstat, and each application was rated only by people who used it.
The research examined hundreds of mobile products, considering factors including technical performance, design, available features and trust. Framna describes trust as a combination of whether users believe a product acts in their interests and whether it handles their personal data responsibly.
Dating platforms performed particularly poorly on these questions. Although users generally considered the applications technically functional, many did not believe that their business models were aligned with the purpose for which people downloaded them.
The platforms generate revenue through subscriptions, premium features and prolonged engagement. Users, by contrast, generally want to meet someone and eventually stop using the service.
This creates an unusual commercial paradox: a dating app loses an active customer when it successfully helps that person find a lasting relationship.
When matching becomes another form of scrolling
Arvin Razavi, a data scientist at Framna and one of the report’s authors, told SVT that online dating had partly shifted from the hope of finding a partner towards a form of habitual or “doom-scrolling” entertainment.
Users interviewed for the study felt that platforms prioritised financial returns over helping people establish relationships. Some also questioned how dating apps use personal information and how their recommendation systems decide which profiles are shown.
Framna’s broader analysis found that low trust can undermine users’ perception of an application even when it performs well in other areas. The company’s analysis of trust in mobile services concluded that poor trust scores pull products below the market average regardless of their technical quality or range of features.
The problem may therefore be more difficult to address than improving an interface or correcting technical faults. Dating companies would have to persuade users that the platforms are designed around their interests, even when those interests may conflict with the companies’ need to retain paying customers.
Fewer Swedish singles are dating online
The dissatisfaction identified by Framna follows a broader decline in online dating in Sweden.
According to the Swedish Internet Foundation (Internetstiftelsen), only 18 per cent of Swedish singles aged 16 or older used online dating services in 2025. The figure had fallen from 27 per cent in 2022, a decline of nine percentage points in three years.
The reduction was particularly pronounced among people born in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, where participation almost halved. More than half of Swedish singles said they preferred making initial contact with a potential partner offline.
The figures do not prove that distrust alone caused the decline. Online dating habits can also be influenced by demographic change, shifting social preferences, subscription costs and fatigue with the repetitive process of matching and messaging. However, the two studies point in the same direction: dating apps are losing both users and goodwill.
The limits of the report
Framna is not an independent academic institution. It is a digital product agency that develops services for companies and public-facing organisations, while also publishing research into mobile applications.
Its findings should therefore be interpreted as an industry study rather than a peer-reviewed assessment of relationships or social behaviour. The sample is nevertheless large, and respondents were selected through an established market research company.
There is also a distinction between the wider public report and the figures highlighted by SVT. Framna’s published methodological material focuses mainly on Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, while treating Poland separately because Polish respondents tended to rate applications more positively. The dating-app results reported by SVT combine responses from all four surveyed markets.
A product that succeeds when people leave
Dating platforms have long presented themselves as tools for turning digital encounters into real relationships. Their current challenge is no longer simply persuading people to download an app. It is convincing them that matching systems, subscriptions and personal-data practices genuinely serve that purpose.
The decline recorded in Sweden suggests that some users are already looking elsewhere, including through social activities and face-to-face encounters. Unless dating platforms can resolve the conflict between keeping users engaged and helping them leave, their crisis of trust may become a crisis of relevance.
