The star aggregate and the written reviews measure different things. Across six platforms, the star average sits between 3.9 and 4.4 - but the most recent written reviews average 1.4 to 2.0, with one exception. Billing is the largest single complaint at four of the six; fake profiles at one; moderation at the last.
Every review on this site quotes the same source: the App Store review feed for each platform's own iOS app, because Apple publishes those with a name, a star rating and a date attached - the one user-side signal we can actually attribute. We pull the star aggregate and the most recent 98-147 written reviews per platform, and the two numbers almost never agree. This note puts all six we could measure side by side.
The gap between the star and the sentence
The aggregate is a tap - millions of people leaving a star with no comment. The written sample is a smaller, self-selecting group who took the time to type something, and on five of six platforms that group is far angrier than the tap suggests.
| App | Aggregate (all ratings) | Written average (recent sample) | One-star share | Top complaint in the written sample |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bumble | 4.3 (1,760,512 ratings) | 1.5 (147 reviews) | 78% | Billing - 40% |
| eharmony | 4.1 (48,667 ratings) | 1.5 (147 reviews) | 77% | Billing - 65% |
| Hinge | 4.4 (1,116,356 ratings) | 3.1 (147 reviews) | 38% | Bans and moderation - 14% |
| Match | 3.9 (238,652 ratings) | 1.6 (147 reviews) | 71% | Fake profiles - 40% |
| OkCupid | 4.3 (288,529 ratings) | 2.0 (147 reviews) | 62% | Fake profiles and billing, tied - 30% |
| Zoosk | 4.2 (105,246 ratings) | 1.4 (98 reviews) | 80% | Billing - 45% |
Billing is the single biggest complaint - at four of the six
eharmony carries the most lopsided pattern of anything we measured: 65% of its most recent written reviews mention charges, refunds, subscriptions or value - nearly two in three, and roughly double the billing complaint rate of Bumble or Match. Zoosk follows at 45%, Bumble at 40%, and OkCupid at 30% - tied there with fake profiles rather than clearly ahead of it. All four are auto-renewing subscription models, and in each case cancelling depends on how you paid, which is a large part of why the complaint recurs: the exit is harder to find than the entry.
None of the six platforms we track publish a price on their own site before registration, so the billing complaint usually arrives after the fact, once a figure the visitor never saw in advance shows up on a statement. How much a dating subscription actually costs is a separate question from whether the billing is fair, but the two are tangled in most of these reviews - people write about the number and the surprise together.
Fake profiles cluster somewhere else
Match has the highest fake-profile complaint rate of anything we measured: 40% of its recent written reviews mention scammers, bots or accounts that turn out not to be real, with billing close behind at 37%. OkCupid's written reviews split the two evenly at 30% each. Bumble and eharmony mention fake profiles too, but well behind their billing numbers - for Bumble it runs at roughly a third of its billing share. What the reliable scam signals actually are turns out to live in the billing structure more than in the profile itself, which is consistent with billing outranking fake profiles as a complaint on four of the six apps here.
Hinge is the outlier
Every other platform we checked sits between 1.4 and 2.0 on its written average. Hinge sits at 3.1, with 45% of its recent reviews at five stars against 38% at one star - the only app on this page where the written sample is not dominated by anger. Its top complaint is different in kind, too: moderation and bans, at 14% - the lowest top-complaint share of any platform here, and a different subject entirely from money. Reviewers describe accounts suspended after ID verification and appeals that read as automated, which is a real complaint, but it is a much smaller share of the written record than billing or fake profiles are elsewhere.
Two platforms we could not measure this way
EliteSingles and InternationalCupid are not in the table above because neither has a first-party US App Store listing we could find and attribute. For EliteSingles, the one US App Store app carrying the name is published by an unrelated company; InternationalCupid has no US listing at all. Rather than substitute reviews we cannot source, the EliteSingles review and the InternationalCupid review say so directly and score that gap in the evidence rather than filling it.
What this means before you subscribe
The pattern holds across five of six apps: whatever the star aggregate says, the people who bothered to write something are unhappy, and the reason is usually billing rather than the dating itself. Read the star rating as marketing and the written sample as the closest thing to a support log. If a working free tier matters more to you than any single brand name, our buying guides collect the platforms that let you message before money enters the conversation - which, on this evidence, is also where the complaint rate tends to be lower.
Every number above comes from the same method we run on every review: Apple's own published star and name-attributed written reviews, most recent sample per app, checked against the same criteria across all eight platforms we track.