Say hello to BeReal, the photo-sharing app that tries to stop us faking it

Not another social network. This is the tagline for BeReal, the new top free mobile app on the App Store, and also a valid reaction to its existence.

With a name that ironically sounds like it has been made up for a Netflix drama, this photo-sharing app is now surging in popularity so much that complaints about its technical glitches are proliferating on other apps.

BeReal is capturing the imagination of Gen Z (born 1997-2012) precisely because it doesn’t want them to use theirs. This social network is different, and not just because it’s French. You cannot be anyone or anything you want on BeReal. You can only be you – or, at least, it’s harder not to be.

It works by sending users a simultaneous once-a-day push notification declaring it is “time to BeReal”. A two-minute timer counts down. Within these 180 seconds of abject terror, users must let the app take a picture with their smartphone camera and then upload it to BeReal.

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Users can post after the two minutes, but their friends will be informed they did so “late”. They can opt not to post at all, but then they won’t be shown their friends’ photos that day. There is no lurking on BeReal.

There are also no filters, editing tools or hiding places. The app will take two synchronised pictures using the front and back-facing camera, with one inset in the other, so users’ friends – or everyone, if posted publicly – can see both what they look like and where they are.

Every second spent searching for the least-worst combination of lighting and camera angle, while madly dashing for the hairbrush, is one lost to the task of clearing the frame ahead of private objects and/or random detritus.

Just to properly derail any residual efforts to maintain the illusion of a cool, glamorous or even vaguely interesting life, users have no control over when BeReal issues the daily prompt.

You could start the day radiating a healthy glow on the top of a coastal peak with an Amalfi-esque view and end it in the euphoric throng of a sold-out music gig, only for the BeReal alert to pop up mid-afternoon while you’re slumped on the sofa watching snooker.

First principles

The Paris-based company behind BeReal, founded by Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau, promotes it as "a new and unique way to discover who your friends really are in their daily life" and says one of its "first principles" is authenticity – or authenticité, perhaps.

Even assuming it has enough staying power to survive this wave of hype and avoid a Clubhouse-style flop, there are many question marks. BeReal currently makes a virtue of its limitations, but we have been here before. Once social media companies become hooked on advertising, they feel obliged to maximise engagement and revenues, often diluting what made them unique.

TikTok, for instance, is no longer strictly the "short-form" video app that YouTube and others are desperate to nullify. Later this month, it will stream the Eurovision Song Contest. Twitter was once a much pithier place, bound by a 140-character limit, but now it allows double that count, plus quote-tweets and threads that eat up the screen.

Meta-owned Instagram poses the clearest example, however, of a magpie social media app. It began life as a home for square-format photos that, thanks to image filters with names like Lo-fi and Nashville, could easily be transformed into indie album covers from 1995. An army of influencers became proficient at curating glossy, manicured lifestyles on its feed.

But the app is now wedded to multiple methods of supporting video, each one of them added in response to a rival – a defunct rival (Vine), a containable rival (Snapchat) and a worryingly successful rival (TikTok).

BeReal can still credibly position itself as the imperfect alternative to the perfection aesthetics of Instagram, but Instagram itself has become a messier place. If it rolls out a BeReal copycat feature by autumn, it will shock no one.

Logic dictates that BeReal’s investors won’t want it to stay free and advertising-free forever. It might not even matter if the platform is cautious about welcoming advertisers in. Various commercial interests will find a way on to it anyway. Its real-time, simultaneous posting aspect makes it too seductive for them not to try. Its anti-influencer design will almost seem like a challenge.

The odds seem against BeReal staying true to its original, authentic self and not selling out. But what about that pitch anyway? Can that be let to just pass?

Let’s be real here. I was born in 1979, I don’t have any friends on BeReal. Nor, despite installing the thing, do I expect to amass any. But it absolutely fascinates me that this trumpeting of the “authentic” and the “real” is back in fashion.

If this is a genuine vibe shift, and not a mere marketing ploy, it is a cyclical one. Gen-X – born 1965-1979 – was dispatching “fake” as an insult before their spiritual descendants in Gen-Z were born. “Phony” was the disparagement of choice for The Catcher in the Rye’s mid-century teen narrator. There were probably prehistoric eye-rollers who thought the art on the cave walls next door was a bit try-hard.

BeReal could become a celebration of the mundane and unimpressive – a mopey festival of the drab and pasty – but that won’t necessarily make it real. The peak of the Instagram brag-fest years coincided, after all, with hashtags such as #nofilter and #nomakeupselfie. “Authenticity” isn’t devoid of artifice.

Social maturity

That social media has become algorithmically efficient at exacerbating mental health crises among the young has become the stuff of parliamentary hearings. We like to think we’re mature and sophisticated enough to rise above it, but it’s easy to succumb to envy, resentment and other corrosive emotions even as we’re pressing the heart button.

Still, I look forward to the BeReal backlash that posits there is nothing inherently unhealthy about wanting to project an idealised or stylised version of ourselves. We do this all the time offline, too.

There are also no guarantees that the instruction to be “real” will make anyone less prone to overthinking or more immune to the disappointment of comparison culture. BeReal says it is the antidote to the pressures of social media. It’s far more likely to become yet another iteration of them.