Hi Elijah,
The dating apps that override the distance range that you have set often do it because they are having a hard time finding the matches that you are seeking within the 25 mile distance range that you have set.
It is something that a lot of them do by default, whether it be Facebook Dating, Plenty Of Fish or Tinder. The algorithm isn’t finding enough of the types of matches that you have specified in your match preferences and default to looking for these matches outside of your distance range.
If you don’t live in an area with a high density of people, the chances of dating apps doing this sort of thing is even stronger as there just aren’t enough people who meet your specific match preferences to match you with.
In the end, they figure that it would be best to show you more matches, even if it means going beyond your distance range settings, than giving you fewer matches or none at all.
A way that you can lessen this is to be less stringent in the preferences that you specify that you are looking for in a match.
If there are some qualities that you can do without, without sacrificing the most important qualities that you are looking for in a match, remove them as preferences. This broadens the pool of people that you can get matched with and increases the likelihood that you receive more matches within your distance preferences.