Longfellow rolls into the new school year with a new social media trend. BeReal has the attention of many teens, and it has been sweeping the nation with almost 54 million downloads.

The app is a French social media platform that was created in 2020. Once every day, at a random time, users are sent a notification telling them to post. The idea is that you have two minutes to take a photo and send it. Actually, they want 2 photos, 1 of whatever is in front of you, the other is a selfie.

 It is considered one of the most popular social media apps, with a daily number of 10 million users a day.

“It’s a fun app,” said 8th grader Lily Dagon, who rates the app a 9/10, though she indicated that it can be inconvenient. “They go off at the worst times. They’ll set off a BeReal at 3 am when everyone is sleeping, and everyone’s BeReal is hours late.”

Though the idea is to avoid excessive curating of your online content, in essence, showing who you really are, multiple students have told us that they wait to post their BeReal as it makes them look better if they are doing something with friends. 

The ability to wait is important, though, as people might not be near their phones when the notification goes off.  But much of the appeal exists in doing things at the same time as your friends.

“It’s also pretty cool because you can add all your friends, and when you get to snap a picture, you get to see what you’re doing at that moment,” said 7th grader Nayla Achir.

Teachers have become aware of the app as well, through their children, like P.E. Teacher Mr. Stokes. Though he isn’t using the app, he says if he had BeReal, he’d always be on time. 

Due to its lack of features, some students rate it lower or skip out on the app entirely. 

“I think it needs more features because I feel like it’s boring that you only go on the app once a day,” said student Emma Eklund. That said, she still rates the app a 9.97/10.

Its limitation can also be a selling point, as it keeps users from getting addicted. The app is so popular other apps are trying to compete by adding similar features. For instance, Tiktok adopted a feature called “Tiktok Now,” but not many people use this feature as it is a direct rip-off of BeReal. Most just go for the real thing.

“I post every day, you know how it be,” said 8th grader Amir Jackson who rates the app at 9/10.  He can’t always post on time due to school, but he tries to get to it as soon as he can. “Yesterday, I was 20 minutes late, but I had Dr. Patrick take it!” he said enthusiastically.