"BeReal will not make you known or famous, if you want to become an influencer, you can stay on TikTok and Instagram." The scene is set from the description of the BeReal application. This free pellet available on Google Play and the Apple App Store, launched in 2020 by two French people, Alexis Barreyat and Romain Salzman, is a hit in the United States. As the Los Angeles Times reports, it indeed took the top spot on the App Store in that country for three days last week, recording 1.7 million downloads in the week to July 11, the most biggest weekly gain ever, according to digital analytics platform Sensor Tower.
The idea of Alexis Barreyat, who, disgusted by Instagram, had the idea to launch BeReal? Encourage users to share moments when they don't expect it. "Authentic moments, without judgement", specifies the founder, originally from Montélimar (Drôme), with the Parisian. The app was designed for this purpose. Every day, BeReal sends a push notification at a random time. The user then has two minutes to capture a moment and take a picture of it. Particularity of this concept, the application will take two simultaneous shots, using the cameras placed at the front and at the back of the smartphone. It is impossible to view the contents of his friends without having published his own.
With each new photo, the previous one is automatically overwritten. The content disappears 24 hours after being published, but an interface called "Memories" ("Memories") allows you to view, in private, all the BeReals that have been taken. Another clear difference with Instagram: on BeReal, there are no likes. Users can only react with smileys or even pictures of themselves. "BeReal is life, real life and this life is without filters and without likes. BeReal is your chance to show your friends who you really are, for once", can we read in the description of the app, before downloading it.
BeReal is "a candid and fun place where people can share their lives with friends," the company says in a two-page fact sheet mentioned by US site The Verge. "We want people to feel good about themselves and their lives. We want an alternative to addictive social media fueling social comparison and portraying life for the purpose of accumulating influence."
If BeReal is in full expansion, the application is not immune to bugs, however, as reported by the Los Angeles Times. She often encounters problems when everyone tries to upload her spontaneous photos at the same time. Users may have to close and restart the app several times, or if they are able to take a photo, the upload will take too long, which will then cause the "overdue" notice to appear. Since users can't see what their friends are posting until they themselves post, these issues can therefore prevent them from using the app.
In the first two weeks of July 2022, BeReal saw a 254% increase in the number of negative reviews for performance and bugs, according to data intelligence platform Apptopia. In May 2022, reviews citing "negative" or "mixed" performance and "bugs" accounted for 56.4% of total reviews.
But according to Arun Lakshmanan, associate professor of marketing at the University at Buffalo School of Management interviewed by the Los Angeles Times, it's common - especially among social media companies - that when demand suddenly increases, the infrastructure is put on hold. strained. "The faster an application is able to develop, the more likely it is to become popular and stable," he told the American daily.
In any case, these bugs have not deterred most users from staying on BeReal. For the month of May 2022, the percentage of users still on the app after seven days is almost 50% for BeReal, compared to 37% for the other apps. After 30 days, these figures stabilize at 35% and 34%.
As The Verge reports, market research firm Sensor Tower estimates that BeReal has been installed 20 million times. Another company, Apptopia, puts its total downloads at 29.5 million. In January 2021, when BeReal was truly unveiled after a year of testing to resolve technical issues, it only had 10,000 users. The growth skyrocketed in 2022 as young people started discussing the app extensively on TikTok, with many posts on BeReal garnering half a million likes or more.
How far will she go? Hard to say. "The novelty of this application - in particular its two-minute timer - will eventually fade and this more quickly than BeReal hopes, judges the very followed Tech journalist Casey Newton, in his newsletter Platformer. Developers must therefore continue their efforts in fleshing out functionality and fixing numerous bugs in the interface. It's an extremely difficult challenge to overcome, as Clubhouse - the last pop-up social network to briefly establish itself - has learned time and time again. ever since interest in it peaked."
BeReal still sees life in pink. Its creators say they received $30 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners and New Wave, with participation from DST Global and others. In May 2022, Business Insider reported that BeReal was raising a new $85 million fundraiser, led by Russian Yuri Milner's DST Global investment fund, which would value the company at $600 million. dollars. The company employs ten people in Paris. "We are going to recruit twenty-five additional people, and we intend to tackle the international market", enthused Alexis Barreyat recently with Ouest-France. Enough to allow the two French to conquer the world.
