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They work as an introduction mechanism and are poor at everything after that. If you treat them as a way to meet people quickly and then get offline, they work. Treated as a place to talk, they do not. Whether they are worth your time depends far more on how you use them than on which one you pick.
Fixed the profile and still nothing? Sometimes it is the pool, not the photos - the same profile does different numbers on different apps. See which app suits you
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Volume and filtering. You will encounter more plausible people in a month than in a year of ordinary life, and you can state your intent up front in a way that is awkward in person.
They are also good at reaching people outside your usual circles. Different neighborhoods, workplaces and friend groups that you would never otherwise cross become one swipe away.
Everything about attraction that is not visual, and everything about a person that only shows up in the room. This is why an excellent text rapport regularly produces a flat first date. It is also why meeting sooner is better: the app cannot tell you the thing you most need to know.
Keep the in-app stage short - a few days of good messages, then propose a short meeting. Make the first date small and cheap to accept, so a flat one costs you an hour rather than an evening.
Judge the apps on dates met, not matches collected. Matches are the cheapest and least informative number the apps give you. If you have collected plenty of matches and met almost nobody, the problem is the step between chatting and asking, not the app.
Long text-only connections that never become plans. Swiping out of boredom with no intention of messaging. Rewriting your profile every week without testing anything. These are habits, not verdicts on whether the apps can work for you, and each one has a direct fix.
If you have fixed the photos, written a bio that can be answered, and run two months on a well-populated app with no conversations at all, the local pool may genuinely be the constraint. That is much rarer than it feels at month one.
Before concluding it, widen your distance and age filters for a few weeks, or run the same profile on a second app with a larger local user base. If neither changes anything, the pool is the honest explanation.
It is reasonable to take a break when the apps make you feel worse about yourself more often than they produce good conversations. Stopping for a month and coming back with fresh photos is a legitimate strategy, not a failure.
Meeting people through friends, classes and clubs works alongside the apps, not instead of them. Use whichever is producing real meetings at the moment.