It’s time to BeReal

If you haven’t heard of BeReal, where have you been?

The extremely popular app has been a big hit with Gen-Z. Hitting number one on the Apple store in July 2022 and remaining there until the start of September.

As of October 2022, BeReal has been downloaded over 53m times worldwide, sparking copycat features on rival platforms such as TikTok.

Every day the app prompts you to share a photo of the moment with friends or the discovery page. The notification comes at random times, stating it is time to Be Real.

Once you click the notification you get two minutes to take your photo but the photo isn’t only taken from the front or back camera, it uses the dual camera feature and takes a photo from the front and back camera at the same time.

Being very simple to use in comparison to other social media platforms and BeReal has a genuine feel to it.

Users can only post once a day to show what they’re doing at that moment. After posting friends can react to your BeReal with a live reaction, again emphasising being real through an authentic reaction.

This is the complete opposite to other social media apps, in which everything is posed and carefully selected and uploaded for everyone to see only the best parts. It wants users to be authentic and as they say be real.

Although you can choose to post later and take the BeReal photo multiple times before posting, it’ll show after it’s been posted how late the post has been uploaded and how many retakes were done.

However, this doesn’t stop people from posting late and still trying to make their upload for the day perfect.

As with everything else as humans we cannot help but compare. If a friend was doing something cool and your BeReal is just of you in bed, it could affect your mood. Especially if you see friends doing something every day through the app. But this defeats the purpose of the app.

Although an app can try and make the experience as authentic as possible, there will always be a loophole with some users either not posting that day or waiting until they’re doing something interesting and fun.

So, how about you, are you being real on BeReal?