Tinder launched in 2012 as a party trick. Swipe right if you are interested, left if you are not, and the app only tells someone you liked them if they liked you back. Mutual interest, revealed simultaneously. The mechanic was so simple it felt like it could not possibly work for anything serious.

Fourteen years later, about one in six Australian marriages involves a couple who met online. Tinder is not the whole of that statistic, but it is a large part of it. It is also, by the accounts of a significant number of people who used it, one of the most demoralising experiences they have had as adults. Both things are true at the same time, which is what makes the question worth asking.

'I was on it for three years,' said Meg, 34, a nurse in Brisbane. 'Three years of first dates that went nowhere, conversations that dropped off after two days, and one guy who was genuinely perfect who I saw four times and then he disappeared. I deleted it after that and felt like I had my life back.'

'I met my husband on Tinder,' said Anna, 31, from Melbourne. 'First date was coffee in Carlton. Second date was dinner. Six months later we moved in together. We got married in March. I know people who think the app is cursed and I genuinely do not know what to tell them because it just worked.'

The gap between those two experiences is not a mystery. It is the thing Tinder was never designed to solve. The app is built to produce matches. What happens after the match is entirely up to the people involved, and people are inconsistent and avoidant, distracted or sometimes just not ready, regardless of how good the algorithm is.

The criticism that recurs most often from people who left the app frustrated is not that it failed to produce matches. Most people got matches. The problem was volume without weight. You can match with forty people in a week and feel lonelier than you did before you downloaded it, because forty matches that go nowhere teaches you something unflattering about how disposable you appear to others and how disposable others appear to you.

'The swiping rewires you,' said James, 29, an engineer in Sydney who used the app for two years before meeting his current partner at a work event. 'After a while you are not thinking about whether you actually like someone, you are thinking about whether their photo is good enough. I became someone I did not really like.'

The people who found serious relationships through Tinder tend to describe the same thing: they were ready, the other person was ready, and they moved quickly from the app to meeting in person. The app was a door, not a destination. They walked through it.

The people who burned out tend to describe something different: months or years of treating it as a lottery, checking it the way you check email, accumulating matches with no intention of meeting anyone, staying on it because the alternative was admitting they were not sure what they were looking for.

'I think I used it to avoid actually dating,' said Sophie, 27, a designer in Perth. 'It felt like I was doing something about being single without having to do anything scary. Like I was ticking a box.'

That is probably Tinder's most honest verdict: it did not change whether people find love. It created a very efficient way to avoid looking for it while appearing to look for it. For the people who used it as a genuine tool and got off it quickly, it worked. For the people who moved in, it became the problem.

The weddings exist. So do the three years Meg lost. The app did not make either outcome happen. The people did.