A dating app aimed at alternative relationships nearly doubled its revenues last year as non-monogamous, queer and kinky users helped the UK-based business expand its reach across the world. Feeld, founded by an entrepreneur couple in an open relationship, has said it is "on a mission to elevate the human experience of sexuality and relationships" from its registered office on an industrial estate in Carlisle, Cumbria. Growth in the app's popularity in recent years, amid surging interest in non-traditional relationship structures such as polyamory, meant that last year was the first for which Feeld was large enough to file full accounts at Companies House. They show that the company's profits increased from 2.4m to 5.5m in the year to the end of 2023, on the back of revenues that rose from 20.7m to 39.5m. The majority of that income is now derived from outside the UK, with 33m of turnover coming from overseas.

In the late summer of 2020, when much of normal social life was suspended, a relationship that I had been in for several years abruptly collapsed. I was thirty-nine and scared by the idea that I would not be reproducing the kind of heteronormative nuclear family I had grown up in. I wandered the sidewalks of my Brooklyn neighborhood, where discarded masks littered the gutters, with a sense of having been exiled from my own life. My apartment, with its cat and its plants, still existed but was no longer my home; I could get a glass of cold prosecco at my favorite bar, but the people I used to see there seemed to have vanished. In Haruki Murakami's novel "1Q84," a character climbs down a ladder into a parallel existence in which things appear to be the same but nothing really is.

It was always a long shot. As I wrote last week, the dating app Feeld recently released a bot for the work-chat platform Slack, which alerts users who mutually expressed romantic interest that they liked each other. Despite Feeld's grandiose claims that using this bot would "make your organization more human" by encouraging people not to hide their crushes at work, it seemed unlikely that workplaces would really want to install this. Slack, apparently, didn't think so either. The company has decided not to list Feeld's bot in its app directory.

It has become one of the most popular dating apps for young, single people looking to meet partners. But Tinder is also the go-to service for some couples looking for a ménage à trois, and it seems the company wants to keep it that way. Tinder is trying to shut down a threesome app called '3nder', suing it over the similarity of the companies' names. You might associate Tinder with young, single people looking to meet partners. But the dating app is also the go-to for some couples looking for a ménage à trois, and it seems the company wants to keep it that way.

Two's company but three's a crowd according to dating app Tinder, which has launched a legal bid to kill off a rival app aimed at people looking for threesomes. Tinder, owned by global dating firm Match Group, is alleging trademark infringement in the high court against 3nder, an independent app for non-monogamous couples and their potential partners. It wants its smaller competitor to shut down and erase its presence from the web entirely to avoid "confusion" between the two apps, claiming the alleged similarity gives 3nder an "unfair advantage". But 3nder launched its fightback in bizarre fashion on Monday, calling on its users to send Tinder pictures of their socks via Twitter, using the hashtag #TinderSuckMySocks. Founder Dimo Trifonov vowed to fight Tinder, which he accused of "loading a nuclear weapon" against his firm, which employs just eight people.

Tinder is reportedly suing 3nder, a rival dating app targeted at people who want threesomes, over the similarity between their names. The company claims to have been "ordered to immediately cease operations" by Tinder, which reportedly believes the similarity between the apps' names could cause confusion for users. In a statement, 3nder said it was "confident" none of its members would ever confuse the two apps, and drew attention to Tinder's lack of ownership of the '-nd(e)r' suffix, used by similar services like Grindr and Adult Friend Finder. Dimo Trifonov, the founder of 3ndr, said: "Our mission and our values could not be more distinct from those of Tinder." "With so many sexualities and relationship structures left out of Tinder and the Match Group [Tinder's parent company] offerings, there is room for all of us."