On a trip to New York in March 2022, my friend Trish - notorious for recruiting her friends to new apps before anyone else has even heard of them - encouraged me to download BeReal with the promise that “it’s so new you can choose any username you want.” I went with my usual, @jehundelt. Months later I stood aghast when I saw a friend request from my sister, who’d claimed the un-addended, @hundelt.
Transitioning us into the current decade, Instagram Photo Dumps developed naturally as a solution to over-posed and over-edited social media presences. Meanwhile, developers Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau took note of our collective authenticity shortage, and decided to build something entirely new. Enter: BeReal. Carefully designed to prioritize enforce “realness”, the app quickly joined the rotation for Gen Z phone addicts and non-addicts alike. But does BeReal have a future, or is it already dead?
To summarize, BeReal allows users to take and share one (front and back camera) photo of what they’re doing at a random but ubiquitous time each day. Once users are alerted with a cutesy notification involving two hazard sign emojis, they have two minutes to take and post their unedited photo. If the first attempt is unsatisfactory, users can retake the picture, but the posted photo will include a note disclosing how many attempts the final image took. Crucially, users can only see what their friends post after first participating themselves, making the acts of sharing and consuming a more equal exchange.
Rather than an aesthetic approach to the Lo-Fi trend, Barreyat and Perreau considered process, and designed an app that is capital ‘S’, Simple. Most notable in this day and age, they designed an app that ends. Feeds are chronological and reset each day. When a user reaches the bottom of their feed, there’s nothing else to consume. Due to the candid nature of the platform, users tend to keep their BeReal circle small, so the scroll to the bottom is typically a quick journey. In short, BeReal is an app that understands our capacity for consumption, and respects it.
As with Instagram Photo Dumps, we must ask where BeReal falls short.
The early result of this format was somewhat depressing - almost exclusively photos of your friends in front of screens, be it home TVs or work computers. Bored, users began waiting until the cooler part of their day and posting late (with a built-in disclaimer, of course), defeating the intended purpose of the app.
However, In April 2023, the developers achieved what no other developers had in the entire history of app updates – they solved the problem. A good year after the app’s initial blow up, BeReal incentivized authentic participation by allowing users to post two additional times each day if they took their first BeReal in the designated two minute window. Because BeReal doesn’t share their user numbers, I only have my own perception to go off of when I say that their popularity had already fallen off steeply by late 2022, but this update brought some users back, and has retained them since. It’s one of the best app improvements I’ve ever benefitted from, and I wish other app updates took as much consideration of their users, rather than pushing features designed to make us spend more money and waste more time.
As of now, the only serious issue I see with BeReal is the incentive to have your phone on you 100% of the time, for fear of missing the day’s notification. However, the “late” disclaimer BeReal likes to threaten is hardly shame inducing. If you can get past your own need to participate the “right” way, I dare say it’s the healthiest social media app out there.
As a 20something still learning how to nurture my long-distance friendships, I appreciate that BeReal gives me a regular glimpse into my friends’ lives, that’s as close to true as can be reasonably requested. Is it often boring? Yes. But for once, the value isn’t entertainment – it’s connection. Because of BeReal, we may be the first generation to have a clear mental picture of our friends’ offices and coworkers. If that’s not intimacy, I don’t know what is.
At the end of the day, BeReal is a steady, simple app that serves its users. As long as that is true, I’ll stick around.
