​At the beginning of 2020, two French people created a social media app called BeReal, which has been a huge success in recent weeks. The app suddenly prompts you to take a quick photo, and the result is an image that combines the selfie with what the camera on the back of the phone “sees”. A few days ago, TikTok launched a similar feature, followed by Instagram.

BeReal bills itself as “the easiest photo-sharing app ever,” and the idea is that once a day, at a time randomly selected by the app, you’ll be invited to take a “BeReal,” a photo that uses both of your phone’s cameras. . As a result, a selfie will be taken, and in the background you will see what the main camera of the phone took a photo of.

The thing is, you’re sharing a real life moment, not something you’ve rehearsed to make it look as good as possible, and from the moment the invitation to “BeReal” arrives, you have two minutes to snap a photo. . You can post photos later, but friends who see them will also see how many minutes you posted compared to when the invite arrived.

In January 2020, Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perrault created a photo-sharing app that was not very successful in the first two years, but in the last two months, the number of downloads has increased, so that it has reached, according to some statistics, the most downloaded application in the United States.

The creators of BeReal try to respond to the most popular programs that base their success on complex photos, where you can choose from hundreds of filters. They needed a simple and authentic app where people could show exactly what they were doing and where they were when a notification arrived. Obviously, the photos are much more boring than those on Instagram, because most people’s lives are not as interesting as the posts seem.

The idea is to see a real moment in the friends’ lives, not one full of fakeness and choreography. Since the notification comes at different times on different days, the idea behind the app is that all kinds of real-life moments will be captured.

BeReal has been growing rapidly, but it is unclear whether this trend will continue. BeReal does not have a super algorithm and does not prioritize the most popular posts. But it clearly set the tone for a social media trend: the idea of ​​inviting users to post authentic photos at a certain point in the day to show what their real lives are like.

A few days ago, TikTok announced the Now option, “a daily photo and video experience that lets you share real moments with your loved ones.” Users are prompted daily to take a 10-second video or photo using the main and front cameras “to easily share the highlights of the day.”

Some analysts were surprised that TikTok, which has more than a billion users, mimicked a feature launched by a small French app with several million users.

But it’s a trend: Snapchat recently launched a similar feature, and Instagram is also working on something similar called IG Candid Challenges. In the case of Instagram, this is a big change, after many years only some complex and filter-filled images were considered “Instagram-worthy”.

Sources: Washington Post, AFP, Le Monde