Founded in January 2020 by the French developer Alexis Barreyat, BeReal is a photo sharing app for iOS and Android. Every day at a random time that varies by country, the app sends out a push notification — ⚠️ Time to BeReal. ⚠️ — and users have two minutes to take their pictures. The camera snaps a selfie and a rear-facing photo simultaneously, in a fashion reminiscent of the mid-2010s app Frontback. If you post after the two minutes expire, your photos are marked as “late”; you can’t view your friends’ posts unless you post first. (The post-to-view gimmick has also been used before; I remember when Facebook used it for Slingshot, one of its Snapchat clones.)
Why is all this resonating? On one level, BeReal is simply applying what we have learned about kickstarting new social networks over the past two decades. A creative constraint is essential — think Twitter’s 140 characters, or Vine’s 6-second loops — and BeReal’s two-minute countdown timer has inspired similar ingenuity. The company’s early focus on making inroads with college students is also straight out of the growth marketing handbook.
BeReal is also nostalgic, in the way that every new social network is nostalgic: yearning for a time when only your closest friends were on it, when you felt free to be a little more authentically yourself. That feeling, combined with the pride in being an early adopter of the next big thing, can take a new network a long way.
At the same time, I think all of this undersells just how weird BeReal can be. Your individual experience may vary — I’ve been out of college a long time, and most of my friends on BeReal seem never to leave their houses — but I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a mundane collection of media in my entire life as I have while browsing BeReal.
Casey Newton
On the back of growing discontent with Instagram and the general lack of competing photo sharing apps, this alternative is apparently gaining popularity. Personally, even the simple description of its mechanic makes me suspect I would hate the app with a passion. It has a compulsory vibe that I don’t associate with social apps; having to post pictures at random times within two minutes of receiving a notification feels like a work task, not something I would want to do for fun and unwind. As for seeing other people’s BeReals… I would probably grow bored in less than a week – people my age don’t have such exciting lives to populate a feed each and every day.
everyone i know getting super into this BeReal thing, which seems to be an app where you post one ugly photo of yourself every day? think i’ll stick with posting fifteen malformed thoughts
— Brandy Jensen (@BrandyLJensen) July 28, 2022
The problem with these gimmicky apps that seek to reconnect you with your friends is… that people are keeping in touch with friends just fine on messaging apps – apps you don’t have to use daily for some random made-up rule, where you have more control over when you send updates, of which kind (texts, photos, memes, clips, links), and to whom. This in turn encourages the authenticity so many others are chasing with silly contrived mechanics that frustrate sharing more than encourage it.
Also, apparently Instagram is already taking notice of BeReal and… rolling out its copycat feature called ‘Dual’! Like Clubhouse, BeReal is likely just a one-season wonder, a fad that quickly dies out once people discover a novel distraction.
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