Is it weird to use an app to make friends?

Philosophy · by Simone Rainieri · 6 min read read

No, it is not weird to use an app to make friends; by the numbers it is fast becoming the ordinary route. Dating apps ran this exact arc a decade ago, and friendship apps are partway through the same one. Still, the hesitation deserves a real answer rather than a pep talk. It is a reasonable thing to feel a little strange about. Using software to do something that used to happen by accident, meeting people through school, work, a neighbor, a friend of a friend, feels like admitting those accidental channels stopped working for you. That admission carries a small sting even when it should not, especially when the accidental channels genuinely have been shrinking, not just in your own life but across the population.

The precedent already happened, with dating

Online dating went through this exact arc already, and the data on it is well documented. Pew Research tracked usage climbing from around 11 percent of US adults in 2013 to close to 30 percent by the early 2020s, with about half of adults under 30 having used a dating app or site by 2023 (pewresearch.org/internet/2023/02/02/from-looking-for-love-to-swiping-the-field-online-dating-in-the-u-s). The stigma did not vanish through some deliberate campaign. It eroded because enough people knew someone, then knew several people, who met a real partner that way. Familiarity did the work. One in ten partnered US adults now say they met their significant other through a dating app, and among partnered adults under 30 it is one in five, a striking jump in a single generation's worth of usage.

There is a detail buried in that same research that matters directly here: over half of the reasons people cited for using dating apps at all were not romantic. Being curious, trying to make new friends, and finding friends with similar interests are all reasons a meaningful share of dating-app users already give for being on the apps in the first place. People were already using romantic infrastructure for platonic ends before purpose-built friendship apps caught up. That is not evidence of weirdness. It is evidence of unmet demand looking for whatever tool was closest at hand.

Why the old channels actually did shrink, not just feel like they did

It is worth being specific about this instead of treating it as a vague cultural vibe. Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld and colleagues, publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, documented that meeting through friends and family had been declining as a channel since roughly 1995, well before smartphone dating apps existed, continuing a longer decline in meeting through family, church, and neighborhood that traces back to World War II (pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1908630116). Separately, the American Perspectives Survey found that the share of US adults reporting zero close friends has quadrupled since 1990 to around 12 percent, with the average adult now reporting about 3.6 close friends. So the discomfort of reaching for an app is not really about admitting personal failure. It is a rational response to informal social infrastructure that has been thinning out for three decades, for reasons that have very little to do with any individual person's likability or effort. What that thinning means for whether apps can fill the gap is the subject of [do friendship apps actually work?](https://vairi.app/journal/do-friendship-apps-actually-work)

Where friendship apps sit on that curve now

Friendship-specific apps are earlier on the adoption curve than dating apps were even five years ago, which is exactly why using one can still feel like a slightly exposed thing to admit to. Bumble BFF's own numbers suggest real scale already, more active users than any dedicated friendship app in major US cities since its 2016 launch, which points at a category moving through the same normalization dating apps went through, just a few years behind. Early adopters of any behavior absorb a disproportionate share of the awkwardness. That is not a reason to wait it out. It is just an accurate description of why it currently feels the way it feels.

Worth noticing too: close to half of Americans still say meeting someone through a dating app feels unsafe to them, according to the same Pew research, and that stigma has not fully evaporated even for the far more established romantic category. So some discomfort here is not a friendship-specific problem to solve. It is a generic feature of using software to do something that used to feel more organic, and it fades with exposure rather than argument.

The generational split makes this less weird, not more

If you are under 30, the discomfort is arguably already out of date. Half of US adults in that age bracket have used a dating app, and app-mediated meeting, romantic or platonic, is close to a majority behavior rather than a fringe one. The oddity, statistically, is closer to being someone who has never used any app to meet anyone than being someone who has. If you are older, the stigma is more understandable, since you grew up in a period when the informal channels genuinely worked better, but the ONS and American Perspectives Survey data both suggest those same channels have kept shrinking underneath you regardless of your own habits.

What actually settles it

The honest reframe is not that using an app is not weird. It is that most methods of meeting people work by removing friction, and an app is just the current tool doing that job. Book clubs, singles nights, church groups, company softball leagues, all of these were, in their moment, deliberate structures built to manufacture the accidental encounters that were not happening on their own anymore. Nobody thinks joining a run club to meet people is weird. An app that runs an onboarding conversation instead of a form, then introduces you to one person at a time rather than handing you a swipe deck, the way Vairi is built, is doing the same basic job with better tools. The mechanism changed. The underlying need, wanting a structured, lower-stakes way into a new relationship, did not. The deeper reasons the accidental encounters stopped happening are laid out in [why making friends as an adult feels so awkward](https://vairi.app/journal/why-making-friends-as-an-adult-feels-so-awkward).

So: is it weird? Less each year, by the numbers, and it was never weirder than any other deliberate way people have built to find each other. It just has not had a decade to become invisible yet.

A generational scenario worth walking through

Picture two people, ten years apart, both considering downloading a friendship app for the first time. The 24 year old grew up watching dating apps go from a punchline to the default way most of their peer group met partners, per the Pew data showing roughly half of under-30s having used one. For them, the mental leap to a friendship app is small, closer to a lateral move than a new category of behavior. The 42 year old came of age before dating apps existed at all, formed most of their adult friendships through college, early jobs, and a physical neighborhood, and is only now noticing that those channels have quietly stopped producing new friends the way they used to. For that second person, the discomfort is real and the comparison to dating-app normalization is less immediately intuitive, because their personal experience of meeting people the old way genuinely used to work.

Both are responding rationally to their actual environment, not to some collapse in willpower or sociability. The Rosenfeld data shows the friends-and-family channel for meeting people declining since 1995, which means the 42 year old's early adulthood genuinely did benefit from infrastructure that has since eroded further, while the 24 year old never really got to rely on it in the first place. The 42 year old is not behind. They are noticing a real structural shift a bit later than someone who never knew the old system.

Why naming the discomfort out loud helps

A lot of the residual weirdness around app-based friendship comes from treating the discomfort as evidence that something is wrong, rather than as a normal, temporary artifact of a category still early in its adoption curve. Dating apps had exactly this same period, roughly the mid-2000s through early 2010s, where telling someone you met your partner online required a small preemptive explanation. That explanation requirement quietly disappeared within about a decade, not because anyone won an argument about it, but because enough ordinary, unremarkable people did it and it stopped being notable. Friendship apps are somewhere in the early-to-middle part of that same arc right now, which means the honest expectation is that this specific discomfort has a shelf life, not that it reflects something true about the underlying behavior.

What actually changes the feeling faster than time alone

Time is the main thing that normalized dating apps, but it was not the only thing. Visibility helped too: as more public figures, coworkers, and family members openly mentioned meeting a partner online, the behavior stopped feeling like something to hide. The same visibility effect is available to friendship apps faster than people might expect, precisely because the underlying discomfort is social rather than personal. Telling one or two people in your own circle that you tried a friendship app, and having that land as unremarkable rather than surprising, does more to dissolve the residual weirdness than any amount of solo reflection on the statistics above.

The normalization math is already on record: Pew Research tracked dating app use climbing from about 11 percent of US adults in 2013 to close to 30 percent by the early 2020s, with half of under-30s having used one, while the American Perspectives Survey found the share of US adults reporting zero close friends has quadrupled since 1990 to around 12 percent. Friendship apps sit earlier on the same curve, meeting a need the informal channels stopped serving.

Key takeaways

Dating apps went from 11 percent adoption in 2013 to nearly 30 percent by the early 2020s, and friendship apps are running the same curve a few years behind. The demand was always there: over half the reasons people gave Pew for using dating apps were not romantic. The zero-close-friends share of US adults has quadrupled since 1990 to about 12 percent, so the informal channels really did shrink. And telling one or two people you tried a friendship app dissolves the residual weirdness faster than any statistic will.

Related reading: [is Bumble BFF worth it? An honest look](https://vairi.app/journal/bumble-bff-review-is-it-worth-it), [apps to make friends without it turning into a dating app](https://vairi.app/journal/apps-to-make-friends-without-dating-apps), and [how to make friends online that actually become real friends](https://vairi.app/journal/how-to-make-friends-online).

Is it weird to use an app to make friends?

Less each year, by the data. Friendship apps are following the same normalization curve dating apps went through: Pew Research found dating app use climbed from about 11 percent of US adults in 2013 to close to 30 percent by the early 2020s, with stigma fading through familiarity rather than argument.

Did people already use dating apps to find friends before friendship apps existed?

Yes. Pew Research found over half of the reasons people cited for using dating apps were not romantic, including making new friends and finding people with similar interests, showing unmet demand for platonic connection was already there.

Why do people feel awkward about using an app to meet friends?

Mostly because informal ways of meeting people, through family, neighbors, and community institutions, have been shrinking for decades. Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld's research found meeting through friends and family has been declining as a channel since roughly 1995, well before smartphone apps existed.