Drama is
heating up between the dating apps.
Tinder, which is owned by Match Group,
is suing rival Bumble, alleging patent infringement and misuse of intellectual
property.
The suit alleges that Bumble “copied Tinder’s
world-changing, card-swipe-based, mutual opt-in premise.” The lawsuit also
accuses Tinder-turned-Bumble employees Chris Gulczynski and Sarah Mick of
copying elements of the design.
It’s complicated
because Bumble was founded by CEO Whitney Wolfe, who was also a co-founder at
Tinder. She wound up suing Tinder for sexual harassment.
Yet Match
hasn’t let the history stop it from trying to buy hotter-than-hot Bumble
anyway. As Axios’s Dan Primack pointed out, this lawsuit may actually try to
force the hand for a deal. Bumble is majority-owned by Badoo, a dating company
based in London and Moscow .
(It
wouldn’t be the first time a dating site sued another and then bought it. JDate
did this with JSwipe.)
Match
provided the following statement:
Match Group has invested significant resources and creative
expertise in the development of our industry-leading suite of products. We are
committed to protecting the intellectual property and proprietary data that
defines our business. Accordingly, we are prepared when necessary to enforce
our patents and other intellectual property rights against any operator in the
dating space who infringes upon those rights.
I have,
um, tested out both Tinder and Bumble and they are similar. Both let you swipe
on nearby users with limited information like photos, age, school and employer.
And users can only chat if both opt-in.
However,
Tinder has developed more of the reputation as a “hookup” app and Bumble
doesn’t seem to have quite the same image, largely because it requires women to
initiate the conversation, thus setting the tone.
As
TechCrunch’s Sarah Perez pointed out recently, “according to App Annie, Tinder
is more than 10x bigger in terms of monthly users and 7x bigger in terms of
downloads in the last 12 months, versus Bumble.”
We’ve
reached out to Bumble for comment.
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