Here’s my current breakdown of the most popular, promising, and/or useful apps I’ve encountered.

Popular Dating Apps

Hinge is one of the top dating apps in the US, featuring prompt-driven profiles, responsive users, and a strong emphasis on finding relationships.
Tinder is the most popular dating app in the world. Users aren’t super responsive on it, but it’s still useful for getting a sense of who’s in your area and quickly learning who you might be attracted to.
Bumble is similar to Tinder in structure, function, and overall popularity, except that on Bumble, female-identified users must send the first message.
Match is the longest-standing dating app, with international reach and serious-minded users looking for relationships.
Plenty Of Fish (POF) is a catch-all app with decent search functions and an allegedly large global user base, but mostly underwhelming profiles.
Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB) tends to attract well-educated users seeking monogamous relationships.
Facebook Dating has lots of users, complex profiles, and search capabilities (e.g., filter by Instagram posts, shared FB groups/events, etc).

For compatibility assessment

OkCupid gained notoriety for its matching algorithms and for having the most in-depth profiles of any dating platform. It tends to attract quirky people who enjoy reflecting more deeply on compatibility.
Inni was created by the personality testing platform Dimensional and uses personality science and AI to suss out granular compatibilities between every user. It offers in-chat AI agents to bolster conversations (hands down my favorite addition to dating app chat experience) and brilliant rundowns of your toxic traits and why you may or may not be compatible with each person whose profile you're browsing.
eHarmony is famous for its long personality/matchmaking questionnaire. It’s a paid platform that generally attracts more financially stable adults.

For non-monogamy/polyamory/kink

Feeld is a discovery app for non-monogamous/sex positive people featuring longer profiles than the industry average. It allows for solo and partnered profiles.
Plura is an event-driven community app for finding caring, kinky, and consensually non-monogamous individuals.
#Open is an app for non-monogamous individuals with great preference/profile options, albeit a clunkier design. It allows for solo and partnered profiles.

For hookups

Pure optimizes for on-demand hookups and creative arrangements. You post a single photo and a personals-style tagline of what you’re looking for, and see who’s nearby and logged in within the past hour.
HUD is a hookup-themed app with special sections for sharing what’s “in your bedroom,” i.e., the kinks you care to highlight and share.

For pre-arranged social setups

222 sets you up for dinner with three other people (usually balanced in gender), then sends you all to a bar where all that evening’s participants gather to meet.
Breeze features no in-app chats; you simply go on the app, pick people you’re attracted to, pick times you’re available for a date, and Breeze picks a place and time for you to meet one of your available matches.

Social apps for event & community discovery

Partiful is a popular platform for hosting or attending casual events hosted by those in your extended network. Attending one event gets you on the future mutuals list for all fellow attendees, so you discover more as you attend more.
Lu.ma is a slightly more dressed-up and professional-feeling version of Partiful. It’s great for hosting your own recurring events.
Meetup is one of the longest-standing platforms for event hosting and community discovery. When in doubt, check here to see if something you’re curious about already has a longstanding local meetup group.
Eventbrite is a robust event hosting platform that's endured for over 2 decades, with nearly 100 million annual users.
BFF focuses on finding same-sex friendships, featuring group chats and community discovery.
Cuties is designed to be a directory for dating, friendship, and collaboration, with rich, real-feeling profiles full of people's projects, communities, and nerdoms, with a creative vouching system to let you talk up your friends and make the vibe feel more like a genuine community of real, thoughtful people who likely know each other IRL in many overlapping ways.

AI driven dating/matchmaking apps

I'm still working my way through these. Thus far I've downloaded Lara, Harmonizer, iris, AIMM, Maia, Laila, Sitch, Amata, Soulmate, June, and Known. I would love to hear your thoughts on which ones are working, which are most commonly used in your area, and importantly, which ones are fun!

My disclaimers/recommendations

Most dating apps, like any startups, fail within their first few years of operation. Don’t be surprised if some of these are suddenly gone.
I typically recommend using at least 2-3 dating apps at a time to maximize your exposure to potentially compatible people and to prevent feeling stuck in any one app’s digital microclimate.
I like maintaining at least one dating app with long-form text affordances like OkCupid, Feeld, or Plura, then one app with a broader reach, like Hinge or Tinder, and finally, one app for pure whimsy, which for me has recently been Inni.

My broader thoughts...

I can’t speak to the physical number of hours you should spend on dating apps, but I can say that it varies tremendously across people I’ve interviewed. Surveys have put the national average around an hour per day, but given that a commonly-cited reason for using dating apps is “confidence-boosting procrastination,” please don’t presume you need to spend that much time to get results. Personally, I try to limit my “search” time to 15 minutes or less in a day. I’ll spend more time on the apps if I’m engaged in active conversations with people. If a conversation feels promising, I’ll begin surfacing ideas for how to meet up so we don’t get stuck in messaging limbo.

DATEWORKING

wisdom and wayfinding through the modern dating ecosystem