Should governments act as matchmakers? This question is being asked in Singapore, where authorities have launched an officially sanctioned dating app for government workers, seemingly in an effort to perk up the city-state’s stagnant birth rate.
Elsewhere in the dating app world, Match Group is going big on marriage-focused app users, Tinder is going big on group messaging, a new app for disabled people is tackling barriers for those in the community, and one dating app is launching its own film festival.
It’s all going on.
Singapore wants government workers to date each other
Singapore’s government has launched a pilot matchmaking service for government workers, seemingly in an attempt to stimulate the city-state’s low birth rate.
The service is called FirstDate and has been launched with the slogan “Start something real”, but it may as well be, “Start having kids”. It will be available to government workers aged 21-35, and can be accessed using the Singaporean national digital identity system.
Each user is presented with one match at a time, rather than a flurry, to encourage careful consideration over mindless swiping.
FirstDate uses the Gale-Shapley Stable Marriage algorithm. The algorithm pairs people based on their preferences, and has been used for public school and medical residency matching as well as in dating apps.
In 2025, 29,864 babies were born in Singapore, which has a population of just over six million people.
Applications for the current FirstDate cycle have closed, with sign-ups reopening on Oct 20, 2026.
Cynics might gripe about the state imposing itself on people’s love lives, but government dating intervention has led to success elsewhere recently. Earlier this year it was revealed that the Tokyo city government’s official dating app had led to at least 285 marriages, following the app’s launch in September 2024.
Upward app now has less God, more marriage
Match Group’s dating app Upward has been relaunched as a marriage-focused rather than Christian app, billing itself as “the home of modern courtship” and encouraging users to post about when they hope to marry.
Founded in 2020, Upward used to be enormously God-focused, with users sometimes asked to post their favorite Bible verses. The relaunch is an attempt to keep traditional marriage values at the core of the app, but have it come across as far less Bible-bashy.
Upward now says it is “built for people who know marriage is the goal and believe the way they date should reflect it.”
Now on Upward you can opt into a ‘chivalry mode’, which encourages men to send the first message to matches. There’s also a Marriage Timeline feature that lets you share when you ideally would like to get hitched.
Stephanie Danzi, Match Group’s global chief marketing officer, told Mashable: “Many countries in the world have matrimony apps, and for whatever reason, the U.S. has never really had one. Upward was almost naturally emerging as a bit of a matrimonial app by the way that people were using it.”
Tinder goes big on group action
Don’t call it an online orgy quite yet, but Tinder is going deeper into group app dating with the launch of its new Group Hangouts function.
Now on the app you can elect to start a group and invite at least two other Tinder-using friends to join it, along with an activity. The group’s profile will then appear in the app for other users and group members to discover.
Two groups can match if one person from each group elects to ‘like’ the other group. Then the larger shared group chat opens, and all the members can text chat together.
Tinder said that the launch stems from the success of the app’s Double Date function, and data showed women in particular were better-engaged with the app when they were using group functions like these.
The company said that their data findings “reinforce a clear trend: social-first formats help foster greater comfort, confidence and engagement among women on Tinder.”
Able2Love: A new dating app for disabled people
A new dating app for disabled people and “people who genuinely want to date us” has launched, built by a wheelchair user who says they were sick of people ghosting them on other apps.
Brogan Fox, 24, from the UK city Salford, recently launched Able2Love on Google Play. It has features designed to make it more comfortable for people with disabilities to use, and is free.
On Able2Love you can choose when your photos become fully visible to other users, and have interactions with matches before they see you fully. There’s a voice-first blind date function, plus a hands-free mode that reads out profile information to you, so you don’t have to rely on reading text.
The app can also help locate step-free locations in which to have a date. Fox said that the app also sends a prompt to users if they type out something cruel in a message, to help keep kindness levels up.
Fox said: “On the normal dating apps, I would match with someone, we would get on, and then the second my chair came up, the conversation would just go cold. Not every time, but enough times that I started to expect it.”
They added: “I’m just trying to make things better for us guys”.
Queer dating app Jack’d gets a film festival
The queer dating app Jack’d is, to our knowledge, set to become the first dating app to launch its own film festival.
The app is aimed at queer people of color, and will open up the inaugural Jack’d Film Festival to original films made by queer creators. Jack’d bosses said that the focus will be on “stories and/or perspectives of queer people of color”.
The festival will be showcased on the app between November 2 and December 3, 2026. It’s clearly been launched to drive app engagement, but Jack’d has put its money where its mouth is, too, offering two $10,000 prizes to filmmakers, one picked by a jury and one by the votes of app users.
Films can be submitted through the Jack’d Film Festival site, with selected films set to be streamed on the app. You can submit until 5pm ET on October 21.
Rivet offers new ‘social matching’ app style
A new ‘social matching’ dating app has launched, offering a matchmaking-led spin on the classic browse’n’swipe method.
Rivet was founded by Taru Kapoor, a former Tinder and Match Group executive. It works by users registered as ‘matchers’ weighing in on whether two ‘dater’ users should be matched, noting things like shared interests.
Dater users are only ever shown in the app in the context of potential pairings, never alone. If many matchers suggest a strong pairing, it’s put to those in the pairing, who can then decide whether to go ahead with a match and get chatting.
It’s a sort of halfway house between a more traditional matchmaking service and a dating app. The idea is to also get ‘friends of friends’ matched, with users able to invite friends to the app and expand the representation of their social circle within Rivet.
Kapoor told Inc.: “As dating becomes more isolating and optimized, I think there is something worth bringing back into the [center] of it: people and human judgment. Real people help each other find meaningful connections and love.”
