Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000078 · Apps & Platforms → Dead platforms → Disappearing-photo apps · 2020–2024
BeReal
Daily photo app that promised unfiltered authenticity, then lost users fast
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“Apple's App of the Year for 2022. By 2023 most people were ignoring the notification.”
Why Noah kept it
BeReal gave everyone the same random two minutes a day to post a front-and-back camera photo. It hit 73.5 million users in 2022, Instagram and TikTok copied it within months, and people drifted off by 2023. Snapchat covers disappearing photos. This covers the anti-Instagram fad.
- In the Ark since
- 25 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.5 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 40.5 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Noah’s canon · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeReal
What it is
BeReal was a French social app launched in 2020 that sent users one random two-minute window per day to photograph themselves with both cameras simultaneously. The idea was to capture unfiltered, unstaged moments and share them with friends. It grew to 73 million users by 2022 and won Apple's App of the Year, then declined sharply through 2023 and 2024.
Why it’s internet culture
BeReal showed the appetite for an alternative to Instagram's polished feeds, but also that users didn't actually want their friends to see them doing nothing in particular. The app's collapse suggests people wanted the promise of authenticity more than the thing itself.
In 2022 millions of people dropped what they were doing when a daily notification told them to post an unedited front-and-back photo within two minutes. Most of them stopped within a year, once the photos turned out to be mostly desks and ceilings.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2020 · Phone app made in France, which took off on university campuses in 2022 · Also known as BeReal.; a BeReal (one daily post); RealMojis
- What it is
- BeReal was a phone app for sharing photos with friends. Once a day, at a different time each day, every user's phone buzzed with the same message: "Time to BeReal." You then had two minutes to take a photo, and the app used both cameras at once, so friends saw your face and whatever was in front of you. There were no filters, no editing and no follower counts, and you couldn't see anyone else's photo until you'd posted your own.
- Where it came from
- Two French developers, Alexis Barreyat (who'd worked at GoPro, the action camera company) and Kévin Perreau, released it in 2020. It did little for two years, then spread across university campuses in 2022, mainly in the US, helped by students the company paid to promote it. In summer 2022 it topped Apple's chart of free apps, and Apple named it iPhone App of the Year. Instagram and TikTok copied the idea within months. Use fell through 2023, and the French games company Voodoo bought it in 2024.
- Why it mattered
- For a few months it was the main argument against Instagram, where people posted edited photos of their best moments. BeReal promised ordinary life, and its own marketing said "BeReal won't make you famous." Instagram (with Dual Camera and Candid Challenges) and TikTok (with TikTok Now) both copied it in 2022, which shows how seriously the big companies took it. Its quick drop showed the limit of the idea: once the novelty wore off, an unedited ordinary day mostly wasn't worth looking at.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- Millions of people joined an app to post without posing. Within weeks they were posting late and retaking photos to look better, which is the posing again with a time limit attached.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (1.8 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.4 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (8.5 KB)
- Original
- 40.5 KB
- Ark cost
- 12.5 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.2 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.4 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 31.0% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,438 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 1,858 |
History
Kept
“BeReal gave everyone the same random two minutes a day to post a front-and-back camera photo. It hit 73.5 million users in 2022, Instagram and TikTok copied it within months, and people drifted off by 2023. Snapchat covers disappearing photos. This covers the anti-Instagram fad.”