For those first downloading Tinder, it"s often an eye opening experience. The app offers a seemingly endless serving of potential partners, and deciding whether you like someone is as simple as swiping left or right. But with more than 50 million users of Tinder alone, and millions more across dating apps including Bumble, Hinge, Happn, what has digital dating done to our collective quest to find love? Around seven million Britons now use dating apps. While these apps profess to help users find long time partners, the research remains divided. Researchers from the University of Chicago found that the “relationship quality” of partners who meet online is higher. Their study found that the rate of marital breakups for people who met their spouse online was also 25pc lower than for those who met offline. However, another study in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships found that users of dating apps, with their compulsive swiping left and right, actually feel lonelier than they were in the first place. “Although these emerging technologies offer social benefits, certain individuals become overly dependent on such applications and suffer from negative outcomes,” the research says. So should we be comforted by the 26 million matches Tinder claims to secure each day - that someone is out there - or have we been cheated by the dating apps and services that profess to help in finding romance? The dating game “Many popular dating apps are effectively elaborate fruit machines - spiking our dopamine and intermittently rewarding us,” says Nichi Hodgsen, a dating expert and author of The Curious History of Dating: from Jane Austen to Tinder. “They are designed to provoke us into compulsively responding to the likes, winks, swipes and messages and for you to feel the pull that there may be something better for you.” She adds that the apps cleverly use push notifications to constantly pull users back in to dating, nudging users when they have been inactive on the app for a while. Many apps also now offer paid tiers, creating a level of “super daters” who are able to spend extra money to review matches again or match with more potential partners. Tinder, for example, now has around 5 million users on its paid-for tier. According to data from Tinder rival Badoo, millennials spend as long as ten hours a week on their dating apps - while one in six claimed they felt addicted to them. Bad matches But the drive from dating app companies to get users continuing to pay-up for subscriptions has led to some allegedly unsavoury practices. US regulators have sued Match.com, which also owns Tinder, over encouraging users to engage with its app using adverts touting fake love interests to lure users in. The regulators claim Match.com allowed love interest notifications to be sent from accounts that the company had already flagged as fraudulent, sending these to non-paying subscribers to encourage them to sign up. “Many consumers purchased subscriptions because of these deceptive ads, hoping to meet a real user who might be "the one," according to the US regulator. Among the adverts sent to non-paying users were: “He just emailed you! You caught his eye and now he’s expressed interest in you … Could he be the one?” Match Group denies the claims and says the data has been "cherry-picked to make outrageous claims”. This week, there was an apparent kickback against the endless reach of technology firms to digitise dating even further. Facebook was due to release its new service - Facebook Dating - in Europe, that would have matched users based on events and shared interests. But it was blocked over data concerns and its launch delayed. Finding "the one" But just how hard is it to find a long-term partner online? Certainly, all the trends point towards more matches and relationships being developed through dating apps. However,actually quantifying how effective the apps are is more tricky, according to Hodgson. “What"s true is that through a combination of social factors - the jobs market, later and longer education, women working - we"ve started to prolong the time between looking for "the One" and settling on them," she says, “and dating apps are merely slotting in to take advantage of that social shift which dating websites were at the beginning of, so it may not be that they are less effective so much as we are also less effective.” And, while love and dating has always attracted some bad behaviour, dating apps have made it easier for unpleasant characters to get away with behaviour that once did not exist. Hodgson says: “There"s the lack of social accountability of many apps that facilitates behaviours such as ghosting which diminish our sense of hope and self-esteem.” So what advice is there for users hoping for a bit of luck while dating using apps. Is it possible to use the technology in a way that"s healthy? According to Hodgson, a starting point can be turning off the notifications they delivery - limit when you use them to say ten minutes per day - and if you are going on a date with someone, delete the app before you go to give them a chance. “They should be your servant, not your master,” she says.