BeReal: Instagram working on direct copy of popular app

Feature gives people two minutes to post a ‘candid’ photo – just like BeReal

Stock photo of Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp, social media app icons on a smart phone. (PA Archive)

Instagram is working on what appears to be a direct copy of BeReal, the app that has proven immensely popular in recent weeks.

BeReal is an app that sends users a notification once a day and asks them to upload a picture of themselves as soon as possible, whatever they are doing at that moment. As such, it has grown partly in response to fatigue with traditional social networks, as people tire of posed and edited images.

But Instagram appears to be attempting to take on that success with a new feature that largely copies the central feature of BeReal. Named “IG Candid”, it shows a notification and asks people to take a picture within two minutes – the same time period as BeReal users are given.

The feature was first spotted by researcher and leaker Alessandro Paluzzi. It has since been confirmed to be in testing by Instagram owner Meta, though it said the feature was being trialled internally and might not make it to the public.

Meta has already looked to borrow some of the features from BeReal. Last month, it added a new “Dual” feature to Reels, which allows people to take a picture using the front and rear camera at the same time and splice them together, in the same way as happens on BeReal.

Instagram has attempted to keep its popularity by copying its rival apps’ central features before. Instagram stories are now the central way of using the app, for instance, but were taken wholesale from Snapchat; in recent months it has encouraged users to post Reels, which offer almost the exact same functionality as TikTok.

Instagram has even seemingly changed the way its feeds work in response to other competitors. A drastically unpopular attempt to introduce more algorithmically-chosen “recommendations” into people’s feeds led to a viral petition, comment from the Kardashians, and an apology and climbdown from Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram.