The BeReal app asks only one thing of you: When asked, post an unstaged photo that's captured from your phone’s front and back cameras simultaneously. No filters allowed.
I’ve been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally for 30 years, more than half of that time with PCMag. I run several special projects including the Readers’ Choice and Business Choice surveys, and yearly coverage of the Fastest ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs. I work from my home, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.
If you prefer to share pictures that use filters, effects, and carefully handcrafted staging, BeReal is not for you. But after years of highly stylized images dominating social media services like Instagram, people are flocking to the new(ish) app to, well, be real.
On BeReal, authenticity is the rule. There are no special effects, no filters. And when you take a picture, the app (available for iOS or Android(Opens in a new window)) takes two shots—one from the back camera, and the other from the front camera—so people can see your unfiltered reaction as the main shot is taken. You can’t pull images from your phone’s image library. You can’t edit a pic after it’s posted.
Stop being fake. Be real. That’s the whole draw. And it seems to be working. Enough so that just about every other major social network is trying to rip off BeReal’s schtick.
You might think that BeReal sprang forth in 2022 like Athena from the head of Zeus. But like most “overnight” sensations, this app has been around since 2020.
BeReal CEO Alexis Barreyat formerly worked for GoPro, while his co-founder, Kevin Perreau, is a developer. Barreyat reportedly came up with the idea(Opens in a new window) at a mountain biking event while watching people take staged pictures rather than engaging in the reality around them.
The app benefited greatly from paid ambassador programs(Opens in a new window) on college campuses. When downloads started to grow, influxes of cash arrived from venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz, totaling around $115 million by May. The company is now valued at $600 million.
As of August 2022, the app had 10 million daily active users(Opens in a new window), up 1,000% since the year previous, with 73.5 million monthly active users(Opens in a new window). BeReal became the number one app in the Apple App Store on July 25, 2022; as of this writing, BeReal is the No. 2 free app there. It’s most popular in the US but gaining traction in the UK, France, Netherlands, Australia, and Canada.
Anyone with an iOS or Android phone (or tablet) can get the BeReal app. You must sign up for an account, which means giving up your name (or making a pseudonym), plus your birthday and phone number. You can’t sign in until BeReal sends a code via SMS text. You get a URL assigned to your account that you can share, like BeRe.Al/ericgriffith.
The goal is to create a community on BeReal. The app will help you share your URL with BeReal-using friends so they can find you. It asks repeatedly, as many apps do, for access to your contacts list to find friends that are already on the service. You can also search by name or username.
This is also where you can give the okay to pending friend requests.
The app pushes you to take an unpolished pic each day, at the same time as your friends on the app, preferably within two minutes of receiving a push notification. The time of the notification is different each day. Even before you have a community of friends, the app will send randomly timed notifications asking you to post. If you don’t like random, this isn’t the service for you.
You can post any time after the notification drops, but the point is that you and your friends all get the push notification around the same time and post a “BeReal” within a couple of minutes. Late posts get marked as such, so you can feel like a loser. Of course, that feeling may be mitigated if you wait to take a seriously good pic. (If you’re in Paris, who wants a shot of a baguette when they could wait and see the Eiffel Tower?) You can’t see your friends’ posts until you upload pics.
When you take the pics, you don’t get to see yourself. Only the back camera view is on the screen. You get a couple of seconds to compose your face, but that’s it for setup. Don’t expect perfection. That’s how you be more real.
You can choose to delete location info from your pics at upload. By selecting the “Discovery” option, you can also set it to go public at upload so it’s seen by more than just your community of friends. Add a caption when the BeReal is fully uploaded.
Once you see all your friends’ pics—expect to witness a lot of people reclining as they watch Netflix—you only get to view them for the next 24 hours. Then the pics are gone. Your pics disappear from everyone else’s view by the next day as well. It feels like the ephemeral quality of Snapchat with the day-to-day life viewing of Instagram (sans influencer pretension).
Access your own shots again by clicking your profile icon; the pictures live on under Your Memories. They’re only visible to you. They can, however, be shared to Snapchat, Instagram, and Messages. Or use the Share Via button to bring up all the options on your device, like copying it to the clipboard or saving the image to your Photos app.
You can “comment” on other people’s BeReal posts with a “RealMoji,” a personalized emoji you access via a smiley icon. You can’t add them to your own posts.
To delete a BeReal you just posted, you have to go to your Profile page (via the icon on the upper right) and access View all my memories. Find it in the list, and click the ellipsis menu now at the upper right, then pick Delete from Memories. The warning will say “Are you sure you want to delete this BeReal? It will be deleted permanently and will not be recoverable.”
However, that does not delete the BeReal from your friends’ view, and those pics still show on your BeReal main screen. You’ll have to wait out that first 24 hours for it to disappear completely.
You may be curious about when or if someone takes a screenshot of your BeReal. Which happens, since they only get to see the image for 24 hours. You won’t get a real-time push notification, but if you go back to the BeReal app, you’ll see a count of how many screenshots have been taken of your post in a small bracketed number under the caption. Tap it and (once you share your BeReal on another service) you’ll also see which friends grabbed it to save. You can only access this info during the first 24 hours.
You can’t stop friends from taking screenshots of your BeReals. If you want to capture a friend’s BeReal without them knowing, the easiest workaround is to use Screen Recording—the app can’t detect you making a video of the screen.
If you’ve tried BeReal and it’s not for you, it’s easy to delete the account. Go to Profile > Settings > Help > Contact us > Delete Account. It will take up to 15 days, according to the company FAQ(Opens in a new window). If you log back in during that time, account deletion is canceled. (It really doesn’t want you to go.)
You can also change your account’s recorded phone number. If you want to change your username, do that any time under Edit Profile; it won’t go active until after your next post.
The real upside of BeReal beyond all this so-called authenticity is the lack of advertising. Companies and commercial entities can’t create an account.
A lot of people liken the daily engagement to the kind of online community that you see with people embracing something like Wordle. Also, there’s no video support yet—a lack of a feature that people might miss about the old days of Instagram and Facebook.
Naturally, there are imitators. One that recently launched is Daylyy(Opens in a new window), which adheres to a lot of the same tenets as BeReal with a goal of more authentic connections via pictures. It only lets you upload pictures taken via the app—no filters or shots from the camera roll—on a daily basis.
We live in a world where every other major social sharing site tries to copy the latest and greatest trend to keep users interested (and thus keep shareholders satisfied). See TikTok versus the rip-offs like Facebook and Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, and Snapchat Spotlight, to name a few. So it’s no shock many want to outdo BeReal before it gets a toehold.
TikTok itself isn’t immune to copying (it is, after all, just Vine with success). It announced TikTok Now(Opens in a new window) as “a daily photo and video experience to share your most authentic moments with the people who matter the most.” The difference from BeReal is that TikTok Now’s front/back camera combo offers the option to do a 10-second video. The Now feature is already available in the US in the regular app, but may spin out into a TikTok Now standalone app in other areas.
Instagram’s Dual feature, meanwhile, can be found in the Reels section. Click the camera icon in Reels, then click Dual, and you’ll see yourself on the front camera and a thumbnail of the rear; you can switch them around to make one or the other the “main” shot. The default is to make a video not a still picture, but the gist is very BeReal-esque. To add to the feature stealing, Insta is testing out Candid Challenge(Opens in a new window), which will send a notification once a day to tell people to quickly share an unstaged photo using Dual.
Of course, neither of these apps are limiting dual-shots to friends only, nor are they only limited to once per day. And of course they’re allowing filters and effects.
But the question really is, how long will BeReal limit itself? Maybe the company can hold out while it’s still privately owned, but once interest starts to flag, the app may have to open itself up to features like video, filters, multiple posts, and ads—the lack of which make BeReal seem like a treat.
In July, Vice(Opens in a new window) called BeReal “the Only Good Social Media App,” saying it “combines the best things about 2010s Facebook albums, Instagram Close Friends stories, and Snapchat.” But the backlash has already begun. Vice also says it makes everything look boring(Opens in a new window).
A Substack essay(Opens in a new window) by a former BeReal user, meanwhile, says that even with an authenticity-leaning app like this, people still try to glamorize. And author Stacia Datskovska says “the app’s ultimate flaw is that it lets individuals act like they’re beyond the toxicity of social comparisons, while subscribing to that very notion.” The New Yorker(Opens in a new window) argues that BeReal’s moralizing stance against the other social networks is contradictory.
Try it yourself if you feel like the other social networks aren’t giving your online life the authenticity you want to project. At least it’s free and ad-free. For now.
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I’ve been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally for 30 years, more than half of that time with PCMag. I run several special projects including the Readers’ Choice and Business Choice surveys, and yearly coverage of the Fastest ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs. I work from my home, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.
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