Friends by app: ghosting is common in the search for friendship, too

Apps for platonic connections are growing: at Bumble BFF, the friendship offshoot of the dating app Bumble launched in 2016, the number of people using the service at least once a week rose 80 percent year on year, according to a company spokesperson. Newer services have launched over the past three years: Timeleft brings strangers together for dinners and other outings based on a questionnaire and says it has more than four million users in over 200 cities across 52 countries. 222 seats six strangers at one table, operates in 21 cities and cites more than 100,000 members. Sonder relies on visual moodboards and local activities such as walks or game nights.

A Washington Post report, also published on 30 October by The Spokesman-Review, describes familiar problems, however. One young woman first found a group through BFF, but the friendships faded after a falling-out and a move; a later Timeleft dinner did not click, but at the open gathering afterwards she met a group she now sees weekly. A 28-year-old man found meeting matches awkward and deleted the app. Another user describes, after four years, unwanted romantic advances, pitches to join multilevel marketing schemes and being ghosted after three meetings – yet she stays signed up 'just in case'.

Eric Balki of Lancaster University's Faculty of Health and Medicine, who studies dating app algorithms, told the paper that friendship apps are also 'designed to keep you on there'; he compares the matching to slot machines whose occasional small rewards keep users coming back. Historian Sarah Gold McBride of the University of California, Berkeley, has observed students looking at their phones before class – cutting off the casual conversations from which friendships can grow. Bumble points to its groups and events for in-person meetings: 'What we're seeing on BFF reinforces that desire,' the spokesperson said.