Jews are asked to set a place for arrested journalist Evan Gershkovich at Passover Seders.Doubling down on so-called authenticity risks making the app more monotonous. “It’s something to do, but it’s not the thing to do anymore,” she said.īeReal faces a dilemma, said Niklas Myhr, an associate professor of marketing at Chapman University. Riley still uses the app but said it was well past the point of academic interruption. In the fall, entire classrooms were whipping out their iPhones in unison, she said. That made it feel collaborative at first, said Oriana Riley, 20, a Stanford University student. The app does not allow users to see friends’ posts until contributing their own. “We want for ourselves what we want for our users - not to chase fame or the spotlight or to be tethered to metrics like the number of followers or number of downloads,” reads a statement posted to the company’s website in November. The number of people who use the app daily has dropped 61 percent from its peak, from about 15 million in October to less than six million in March, according to Apptopia, another analytics firm.īeReal declined to comment for this article, and the company does not share its numbers of users. The app’s monthly downloads have been slipping since September, according to data from Sensor Tower, a market intelligence firm. “Gen Z hops on trains really fast, but they hop off even faster,” Mr. Most of his friends no longer use it either, he said. But after a few months, he tired of scrolling through nearly identical pictures of their laptop screens and deleted the app. When Night Noroña, 17, a high school student in Redding, Calif., downloaded the app in August, he liked seeing that his friends’ lives were less glamorous than the highlight reels they posted to Instagram suggested, he said. Some users have discovered that seeing the monotony of their own lives reflected back at them is compelling for only so long. By July, BeReal had soared to the top of the iPhone app store. The app billed itself as an alternative to the artifice of social media: If Instagram had become a catalog of cosmetic enhancements and painstakingly arranged tableaus, BeReal’s feed full of limp salads, messy apartments and unflattering selfies appeared an attractive refuge. It was time to BeReal.īeReal, a French photo-sharing app founded in 2020 that took off on college campuses, prompts users at a different time each day to take shots with their front and rear phone cameras. As if in a trance, many people paused their conversations or lowered their video game controllers.

Each day last summer, a black-and-white notification appeared simultaneously on millions of phone screens.

Life and fate