Swiping left or right defined an entire decade of how people meet. Now the two biggest dating apps are simultaneously announcing that the gesture is in their way. Bumble presented the first results from its new app Plans on Wednesday, and chief executive Whitney Wolfe Herd told analysts the company is preparing a full replacement for swiping.

Plans is conceived as a way for young people to meet in small groups - a drink or dinner at a local place, without the pressure of it being a date. The idea is that a friendship or a relationship may come out of such meetings later, but nobody walks in with that label attached in advance. "I firmly believe the future of meeting people in groups will become increasingly important," Wolfe Herd said. "People want to gather in a group and see who they naturally have chemistry with once they've already met."

What makes the news bigger than one app is that Tinder announced in the same week that it too has turned towards live events. When the market's two biggest players declare their own core mechanism obsolete in the same week, that isn't coincidence - it's an admission that the format no longer works for the generation supposed to use it.

Wolfe Herd also hinted that Bumble is working on a new interaction model that will replace swiping entirely. "The basic idea is moving away from optimising for swipe speed towards something more considered - fewer, but better and more seriously weighed signals," she said, adding that the change will be gradual so as not to disturb the ecosystem. What exactly comes instead - she won't say, for competitive reasons.

The numbers explain why the tone is what it is. Bumble's second-quarter revenue fell 15.2 percent year on year to $210.5 million, and the stock took a hit after the third-quarter forecast, which predicts a drop in paying users. The company beat earnings expectations but remains in turnaround. This is not a company changing course from a position of strength.

The company is also promising more AI tools under the surface, but immediately hedged that this doesn't mean Bumble becomes an "AI-driven experience". The hedge is understandable - it's hard to sell users real meetings in person while telling them the algorithm will decide who with.

What goes unsaid in all these announcements is why swiping failed in the first place. That mechanism was designed to keep people inside the app as long as possible, not to get them out of it. It worked flawlessly - for the companies. Now that users are leaving, those same companies are discovering that meeting in person was always the point.