the fever of BeReal seems to have no brake. A few weeks ago, we told you that this network was acquiring a fairly large number of users due to the spontaneity and novelty it offers. This week, BeReal has managed to position itself as the most downloaded app in the Google Play Store. While the social network is gaining more and more followers, TikTok already has its clone ready, and Instagram is working on something similar to recover what they consider to be theirs. Will BeReal’s legacy last or will this new network fall to one of its copies?
BeReal flies high, but TikTok already wants to clip its wings
Throughout August, BeReal has been fighting in the app stores with more established networks like Instagram or TikTok. The snowball effect has been doing her job, and for the last few days, BeReal has managed to get to the top.
It is estimated that the network already has some 20 million active users. What we don’t know at all is whether BeReal will be a fad or if it will end up making a name for itself in the market. Looking not too far back, highly promising cases like ClubHouse or Stereo were totally forgotten, so it wouldn’t be surprising if BeReal ended up with the same outcome.
TikTok Now: the BeReal clone is now available
TikTok never hid the idea of working on functionality similar to that of BeReal. The wait has not taken too long, and a few days ago it arrived tik tok now, an identical functionality that is reaching all users of the social network.
TikTok Now works with the same Push alert system. Once a day, and randomly, users receive a notification on their mobile phone that encourages them to ‘be real’. On BeReal, this message says something like ‘It’s time to BeReal’, while TikTok does its version with the text ‘Time to Now’. It doesn’t sound that great, but the important thing here is the functionality itself. At the moment the notification is received, the user has to make a video 10 seconds —or a still image— with the phone’s front and rear cameras. In this way, you can see both the user and the context of what he was doing.
Tiktok beats Instagram again at home
With this new mode of use, the Chinese social network is well ahead of Meta, which is currently preparing identical functionality for Instagram. TikTok has become the first social network to copy and paste this feature into its ecosystemleaving behind Instagram and Snapchat, which also seems to be working on its particular clone.
Time will tell if BeReal will hold out or if it will fall to so many clones. This also fuels the debate about how legal it is for a social media giant to blatantly copy a feature invented by a small group of entrepreneurs. Didn’t patents and copyrights exist? For Zuckerberg and ByteDance, it seems not.
