‘Unusable’: The enshittification of Grindr

A dystopian scene played out during Grindr’s latest earnings call. Investors joined the line on Feb. 26 to discuss the company’s financial performance for the 2025 fiscal year, along with its operational goals for the future. After some initial housekeeping, callers were greeted by the voice of Grindr’s CEO, George Arison.

“Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us today,” he said. “2025 was an exceptional year for Grindr. Revenue grew 28 percent year over year to $440 million.” His voice was clear and crisp, but a little bit too robotic for a tech bro who was delivering good news to his financial backers.

Arison proceeded to outline the company’s future priorities, which include a heavy push of its newly announced ultra-premium-tier subscription plan called “Edge,” which claims to use artificial intelligence dubbed internally as “gAI” or “gay-I” to improve the quality of matches on the app and streamline conversations for a whopping $199 per week.

“This AI-native premium tier is built for power users who want the most capable version of Grindr that today’s technology enables us to build,” he explained. “We’ll continue refining the experience and testing price points throughout the year.”

After a couple of minutes, the tone in Arison’s voice shifted. He suddenly sounded more present and alert, as if he were reaching through the phone to deliver the details in person.

“Up until this point, these remarks were read by AI using a proprietary voice model trained on my voice by one of our [teams],” he revealed on the call. “We did that deliberately as a small demonstration of how deeply AI is becoming embedded in both our product and operations.”

Grindr is betting big on plans to convert its free user base into paying customers through its new high-priced AI subscription plan and expects to raise more than US $528 million in revenue this year. What remains unclear is how those users are reacting to the app’s new direction amid a global affordability crisis.

During a question-and-answer period, a representative from Raymond James Ltd. (Grindr’s largest stakeholder) asked about recent price increases to the app’s subscription plans, XTRA (which has no affiliation to this publication) and Unlimited, and the impact those changes have had on user churn and retention. Grindr’s CEO explained that the app grew by 5.2 percent last year to 15 million monthly active users (MAU) in 2025, including 1.26 million paying users.

“The user base accepted the price changes very well,” said Arison. “I think that speaks to the fact that we have added an incredible amount of value to both XTRA and Unlimited over the last three to four years, a lot of new features and products were added to those tiers.”

Some of those paywalled features include profile views, private browsing (known as incognito mode), translation chat tools and private photo albums that can be set to expire.

On the heels of the earnings call, Xtra spoke with several long-standing Grindr users who offered a different perspective on the company’s business model and said they’re quitting the app because it has become “unusable” without paying for a subscription. Full disclosure: Xtra’s parent company, Pink Triangle Press, owns the gay dating app Squirt, one of Grindr’s competitors.

Ryan McComb, 52, has been using Grindr since 2009 to connect and meet with other gay men where he lives in Hamilton, Ontario. 

“During the ’90s and 2000s, [society] wasn’t as open as it is today,” McComb explains. “I was closeted, so online venues gave me an opportunity to cruise for sex and try to make connections before I was comfortable enough to go to bars and stuff like that.”

“Grindr—which is available in approximately 190 countries and territories worldwide—is widely credited with revolutionizing gay dating as one of the first geosocial apps for gay men”

In his late 20s, he started using gay dating websites such as gay.com and Adam4Adam to connect with other men. Both sites were extremely popular during the golden age of internet chat rooms, but with the dawn of smartphones, apps like Grindr provided an enhanced experience that allowed users to tap into their device’s GPS features.

“Back then, I was impressed,” McComb says. “I thought it was kind of cool because it was a new technology and having it on your cellphone was just more user-friendly than some of the websites.”

Grindr—which is available in approximately 190 countries and territories worldwide—is widely credited with revolutionizing gay dating as one of the first geosocial apps for gay men. Before it appeared in the app store in 2009, gay men made connections through a variety of ways: by meeting at bars, online chat rooms, phone chat lines, as well as personal ads in LGBTQ2S+ magazines and sites like Craigslist.

McComb says he’s paid for Grindr’s subscription plans a handful of times over the years in order to access paywalled features like unlimited blocking and read receipts. However, over the last decade, McComb says he’s noticed big changes on the app that have impacted the user experience.

“I feel like there are a hell of a lot more advertisements popping up. At times I can’t have a full conversation without having, like, five ads pop up,” he explains. “And then you push a button to exit out of it and another one pops up.”

That’s not the only thing that changed over the years. Grindr has also tweaked the number of profiles who appear on the grid. Under its free plan, users can see a few dozen profiles in their area, but when they subscribe to Grindr XTRA, that number jumps to 500. Meanwhile, Grindr Unlimited subscribers get to see all nearby profiles.

“The user experience has gotten progressively worse,” says Syed, 33, who requested a pseudonym to avoid professional repercussions at his corporate job. 

“You can’t really enjoy it unless you pay for it,” he adds. “That’s part of the reason why I don’t really use it anymore.”

Instead of forking over his hard-earned money, Syed has traded the online dating scene for in-person meeting spots.

“I haven’t used Grindr in like a year,” he says trepidatiously. “If I’m craving something or want to do something, I honestly just go to the bathhouse.”

@xtramagazine Canada’s oldest AIDS organization is closing its doors after more than four decades. Founded in 1983, the AIDS Committee of Toronto’s focus was on getting crucial health information out to LGBTQ2S+ communities. During its earliest days, ACT hosted hundreds of events and panels and created posters, brochures, and videos—all with the aim to get the community talking about HIV, how to avoid it, how to get tested and what to do if that test was positive. But these weren’t just any campaigns. Throughout the ‘80s and early ‘90s, ACT became notorious for its evocative public health messaging. The campaigns were in contrast to messaging efforts during that time, which heavily promoted abstinence. While ACT’s final chapter is coming to a close this month, its impact will stand in history as a testament to the many needs—and aspects—of the queer community. #lgbthistory #lgbtqnews #publichealth #lgbthealth #toronto ♬ original sound – Xtra Magazine

He is not alone. According to a 2025 Forbes health survey, 80 percent of millennials and 79 percent of Gen Zers say they feel burned out by dating apps sometimes, often or always.

The recent shift in online behaviour was noticed by Christopher Dietzel, an affiliate assistant professor at Concordia University in Montreal, whose research focuses on LGBTQ2S+ dating apps and digital harms.

“Younger people just lived through a pandemic and are inundated with social media platforms. Their life is incredibly digital,” he explains. “I think there’s a growing movement among young people to assess the extent to which they want to use digital technologies.

“It could be because they’re overwhelmed with social media, but there might be other factors to consider as well,” he adds. “We have seen early reports that younger people aren’t necessarily having as much sex as previous generations. This may not be specific to dating apps, but it plays into the context of intimacy and relationships.”

According to a 2021 study from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), only 30 percent of Gen Zers have reported ever having sex, down from 38 percent in 2019 and 50 percent in previous generations.

Despite these cultural shifts, Grindr’s CEO said the company maintains a firm hold on Gen Z. 

“We have a very strong younger user base, 18 to 29,” Arison told investors during the call. “But we become a little bit weaker at the 45-plus cohort. And we believe that getting those users to re-engage with us is an opportunity, especially in countries like the U.S. and U.K., and that is also something that we are working on.”

While Arison acknowledged an area of weakness among the app’s user base, he offered no insight as to why older users may be turning away from Grindr or how the company plans to win them back. 

As he speaks about the app to investors, Arison beams with pride in describing Grindr as a world-class app that acts like a “global Gayborhood in your pocket.” But that perspective seems disconnected from the experience of some Grindr users like Alexa Irizarry, 32, of Austin, Texas.

She says the app’s incessant pop-up ads pushed her to take what she describes as a “five-year sabbatical” from the app.

“Unless you pay for it, you can’t do anything without an ad popping up. It makes it unusable,” she says. “If you click on someone’s profile, an ad shows up, and then you can’t click off the ad. I have to close out of the app every second when I interact with people.”

She also expressed frustration with what she described as a growing presence of fake profiles on the app—an issue that briefly came up during the earnings call.

“The fake profiles, incessant ads and paywalled features have all led to an unpleasant experience among the Grindr users who spoke to Xtra”

“We did start to much more aggressively remove unwanted accounts from Grindr than we had done in the past,” Arison told investors during the call. “The result was that we removed about 350,000 more accounts in 2025 than we would have done in 2024 had we not put in place all the new tools that we developed.”

The fake profiles, incessant ads and paywalled features have all led to an unpleasant experience among the Grindr users who spoke to Xtra. The declining quality of the app is something that experts like Dietzel describe as the “enshittification” of Grindr, a term coined by author Cory Doctorow.

“It’s this idea that platforms gradually degrade in quality over time, while still remaining usable,” Dietzel explains. “Essentially, they’re going to make it just good enough that you want to use it, but they’re not going to fix anything.”

In a statement to Xtra, a spokesperson for Grindr said in part:

“Following our exceptional growth in 2025, we are continuing to expand and refine Grindr’s products and features. This includes the ongoing testing of EDGE, our latest premium tier powered by gAI. 

“EDGE, like all of our paid tiers, is entirely optional and our free users continue to access the same core features they always have: grid browsing, profile views, Right Now, unlimited text messaging and much more. 

“By offering ads on our platform, we are able to broaden the accessibility of the Grindr experience and offer a substantial amount of our features in the free product. We’re always working to optimize and improve the ad experience, while also maintaining strict guardrails around our users’ privacy, and will keep making adjustments as needed.”

While Grindr users may have concerns about the increased commercialization of the app, internal metrics show that the majority of users haven’t been fazed by the recent changes and continue to use the app.

During the earnings call, Grindr’s CFO, John North, attributed the company’s recent revenue growth to product enhancements that were made over the last two years that allowed the company to raise its prices, as well as continued growth of its advertising business, which expanded by 37 percent last year.

As for what the future of Grindr may look like, last spring, the company rolled out a new telehealth service called “Woodwork,” which offers access to erectile dysfunction medication to Grindr users in need.

“Everyone should think of it as a startup inside Grindr, and it’s a 10-month-old startup,” Arison told investors. “In that time period, it has served thousands of users and thousands of patients. And has launched more than one product.”

Grindr—which is facing a class-action lawsuit in the U.K. for allegedly selling its users’ medical data, including HIV status and testing dates, to third-party advertisers—is now looking to expand its online health service to deliver other treatments like hair care and weight-loss medications.

While the company has ambitious plans for the future—including expanding internationally in countries like India—it’s unclear what that means for the user experience. The concerns raised by McComb, Syed and Irizarry echo hundreds of complaints raised by Grindr users on social media.

On Reddit alone, there are dozens of threads from Grindr users who raised complaints about all the same issues: incessant pop-up ads, fake profiles and paywalled features.

As the company looks for new ways to grow revenue through its expensive subscription plans, Dietzel warns of an effect that he likens to the idea of “shrinkflation.”

“You’re gonna pay more for less, but you don’t necessarily realize that that’s going on,” he explained. “It’s a similar idea in terms of tech companies.

“The product is going to gradually degrade in quality over time, but be just usable enough, or remain just culturally relevant enough that people don’t want to get rid of it,” he added.