Way back in the first year of covid, an app called ‘Bereal’ was released to the world. It would only be in the early months of 2022 where it would begin to spready virally, disrupting the mundane activities of mostly young people once a day, every day.

What is Bereal?

What is Bereal? Every single day, at a random time (more on this later), a notification should pop up on your phone. You’re supposed to, upon seeing the notification, tap it to open the app, and take two photos simultaneously, one from the rear-facing camera to capture what you’re doing, and one from the front-facing camera to capture your expression. Other features include

  • Being in. Only if you post a BeReal that day can you see what BeReals others have posted.
  • RealMojis. You can react to someone else’s Bereal using a picture of your face.
  • Captions. You can caption your own BeReal, and edit it.
  • Comments. You can comment on your and other’s BeReals. You can tag people in the comments, including people who aren’t your friends.
  • Friends. You immediately get a list of people who are you on your contacts who have BeReal. It’s up to you whether you add them or not.
  • Privacy. You can opt to post to the whole word, in a section called ‘Discovery’.
  • Location. You can opt to post your location or not. You can only see others’ exact location if you also share location. Otherwise you only see the suburb.
  • Screenshotting. You can see if someone else screenshots your BeReal.

I heard about it at the beginning of April. To date, I don’t know anyone who’s had Bereal from 2021 - most people I know got it in April, May or June of this year.

Is there a comparable social media?

The point of is to encourage people not to ‘curate’ their social media, by having the notification pop out at a random time every day.

  • It’s not like Snapchat where you can send your friends photos on a whim, or like Instagram where you only post the best of the best.
  • I would compare it to Snapchat streaks though in terms of posting a picture every day, just for the purpose of keeping a streak. There’s no streak tally on Bereal but there’s an implication that, because you’re not going to be doing something exciting every day,
  • You could say it’s kinda a finstagram where you don’t have to be as polished. But I, and most people I know, definitely have more people on Bereal than they would on a finstagram.
  • It’s probably more comparable to ‘Close Friends’ on Instagram in this way, except you can’t post pictures to Close Friends, only Stories. I remember back in the day when you could post to ‘Close Friends’ but Instagram culled that pretty quickly.

The Irony of Bereal

The irony of Bereal is the fact that you can’t meta what you’re doing. This is because, in any given moment, you’re either on your phone, or you’re not.

  • If you’re on your phone, you can’t film what you’re doing on your phone, because Bereal will use your back phone camera not a recording of your screen.
  • If you’re not on your phone, then there’s no reason you should see the Bereal notification on time. What BeReal captures will be the moment you’ve stopped doing what you were doing previously, to get out your phone - it captures the transition of activities.

The alternative would be to have BeReal goggles, but I’m sure people wouldn’t be so keen for that.

Bereal or Befake?

I make a point of refusing to post if I miss it by 15 minutes or so. Otherwise Bereal’s literally just Snapchat. In fact, it feels faker than Snapchat. When I post as well, I also try to get at least a relatively asthetic shot of the scene in front of me - does that make it fake?

The Time of Day

The time of day was a massive issue from the very beginnning. BeReal happens in the evening or night 75% of the time, because of the way the Time Zones work. There are four time zones: Europe, Americas, East Asia and West Asia. I’m not what the boundary between East and West Asia is, but let’s say the border between East Asia and West Asia is UTC +5 (Pakistan) to UTC +12 (New Zealand). Melbourne, where I’m from, is UTC +10, which is relatively late in that time period. To cater for people earlier in the time period, our BeReal times tend to be later.

That’s why BeReal very rarely happens in the morning, but has at times happened past midnight.

BeReal can fix this by simply having a time zone setting, where each person sets the time zone they are in, so that there can be a variety of times during the day.

I feel like it would be good to have a broader spread throughout the day, to highlight the range of activities we engage in through our days. A running joke on Facebook memes these few months has been how late BeReal has been, and that everyone’s just sitting waiting for the Bereal notification to pop out.

User interactivity

When I first got BeReal, everyone was doing RealMojis to every single person’s BeReal. I get it. It’s a new social media, everyone’s excited by it. But then the mundane reality of it kicks in. When I first got BeReal in April, I had less than 10 people on it. But then when it grew, the number of people I knew who had it grew, and therefore the number of people I had on BeReal grew. For most people, during these spikes, RealMojis were used in the first week and then died down very quickly.

Technical Problems

Maybe it’s just me but the app is quite glitchy. I only reliably get the Bereal notification 50% of the time. The other 50% of the time, I get a notification saying someone posted late, which prompts me to post. Sometimes, like today, it’s too late when that happens.

It also takes quite a bit of time to upload to the servers. Sometimes, it takes longer than 2 mins, such that you actually didn’t post ‘late’ (and it shows this by displaying the actual time it uploaded to the server rather than the time you took the photo). I do understand BeReal underwent massive growth in the beginning of 2022, and its servers are probably overloaded, and I expect they are working on it.

Also, you can actually see someone’s Bereal in the notification you get when they post late if you look carefully…it’s not pixellated at all and if you squint you can usually make out what they’re doing.

Overall, BeReal isn’t so bad…

Honestly, when I first got it back in April, I thought it was pretty dumb. Looking back now, it’s a decent concept. I like how you can look back at past memories, like an archive. I close my eyes and I can see the different lives of so many people, I can imagine where they are, who they’re with, and that they’re all united by the use of the app. Brainwashing? Maybe. Fun? Yeah I’d say so, especially when someone’s doing something interesting and wouldn’t have posted it on another social media. Ephemeral? We shall see.