“BeReal App: BonusBeReal Feature Update and its Impact on Authenticity”

Time for BeReal! When this push notification – with a yellow warning triangle on the left and right – appears on your smartphone, it says: say Cheeeese. Because as a user you then have exactly two minutes to take a photo with the front and selfie camera. This is how your friends see what you are doing at this moment – and vice versa.

Even if you don’t use the app, the trend certainly hasn’t passed you by. “Friends from the USA told me that there are moments when people suddenly stop on the street at the same time. They stop and take a photo with their smartphone,” writes Jan-Niklas-Schmidt in a guest post for Business Punk about the hyped app.

In 2019, the two French and co-founders Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau brought the social network to the app stores, but it didn’t really take off until 2022.

via GIPHY

Now BeReal is supposed to get an update, like among other things Techcrunch reported. It’s called “BonusBeReal” which means you can take more than one photo per day. Users would receive two bonus BeReal posts if they managed to upload a photo within the daily two-minute window.

If they miss the window, they would get an extra contribution. The bonus photos could be posted at any time. It would first be tested in Great Britain, with other countries to follow.

Is the magic lost?

Over 20 million people use BeReal every day. But the question arises why the makers of BeReal want to introduce the feature at all. Because with additional photos that you can post whenever, somehow the magic of the app is lost: namely to show what you are doing in a very authentic and spontaneous way.

On the other hand, this feature could be a reaction to the fact that many users are now posting “lates” anyway, i.e. much later than at the time of the push notification. So the basic idea of ​​the app is already gradually disappearing.

No matter how you feel about BeReal: It still produces absurd snapshots, as the Instagram account “best.of.bereal” shows. We have selected eight photos for you: