Every time we think social media apps will never get more creative, we are proved wrong. We thought Instagram was never beatable, until Snapchat. We thought Snapchat was so revolutionary, until TikTok, and now BeReal is stealing the light by offering everything people missed in these predecessors.
Released in 2020 amid the COVID outbreak, the French photo-sharing app took around two years to become a global sensation in the world of social media.
bereal is a great app because it forces influencer types to be content creation ready 24/7, imprisoning them in the hell they create
— law dog, esq. (@ggooooddddoogg) September 19, 2022
BeReal was founded by Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau, the "future social media app" as coined by its developers aims to provide an alternative to filter-filled photo-sharing apps, ones that have long faced criticism over encouraging unrealistic standards of both life and beauty.
Being one of the most simple social media apps, if not THE simplest ever, BeReal pushes 2-minute long notifications to all users every two hours, asking them to take photos using both rear and front cameras, to show their unfiltered-faced in their non-filtered life, providing a very authentic sneak into their daily lives with absolutely no edits.
The app uses only its own camera, as to block any built-in filters or editing programs in their mobile phones.
Whether or not it purposefully aims to shift people's focus from what they look like to what they do, photos shared across BeReal feature small selfies compared to the "big picture", the one that highlights the person's surrounding every two hours.
BeReal photos can either be shared with friends only or with the whole world, using the discovery feature. Users can also add their own captions to their photos.
Moreover, BeReal does not have follower counts or ads to help boost certain content. It is also "not designed to make people famous", minimizing pressure on users who, on other platforms, would feel pressured to do anything to score more likes and make headlines.
These practices have drawn the attention of thousands if not millions of users, mostly young Gen Zs whose experiences with previous photo/video-sharing apps, such as Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok have been heavily distorted by filters and picture-perfect lifestyles, ones that have widened the gap between average users and influencers.
I'm confused now. Am I on tiktok or bereal? pic.twitter.com/YREvvPVCG1
— Catッ¦ dwd 4 days! (@lilocomixs) September 17, 2022
For years now, experts have weighed on the growing negative impact of both filters and unrealistic standards of life and beauty promoted by more conventional social media applications, as they argue that it has put so much pressure on several generations of young people who have not been able to keep up with the non-existent world they see on social media and assume real.
This explains the spiking popularity BeReal has seen during the summer of 2022, as the French-developed app available on both iOS (+58 million downloads) and Android (+5 million downloads) topped the list of the most-downloaded apps in several countries around the world, including Germany.
The massive success achieved by BeReal in recent months has become harder and harder to deny, especially after the world's booming TikTok announced a new feature called "Now" last Wednesday.
In the "Now" feature which will be added to TikTok soon, users will be asked to capture immediate photos to be shared with their followers, in a matter that has been widely interpreted as an attempt to keep up with the BeReal hype. However, TikTok and its other competitors are still heavily reliant on beauty filters to which BeReal came in response.
