It was supposed to be the app that would take the place of Instagram in the hearts (and on smartphones) of twenty-somethings, so popular as to push TikTok to create a sort of clone and come named by Apple the best of 2022 for iPhone. And instead, a few months later, BeReal was already on the verge of fighting not to disappear.
Born in France in 2021, BeReal is a photographic social network which gives subscribers a 2-minute window to snap and snap a picture to share with followers, just the moment you receive a notification, and has been hugely popular since spring 2022 (on Italian Tech we wrote about it for the first time last April).
The most downloaded on iPhone
What is GAS, the app that has surpassed BeReal and TikTok in the hearts of American teenagers
by Emanuele Capone
apptopia: the BeReal download curve
A big summer (of social networks)
During the last summer, the app has known a resounding success, with 40 million downloads (on Android and iOS) in Q3 2022 and 30 million in Q4, the last quarter of the year. Not only that: it has long been the most downloaded app on the US App Store and has garnered over $60 million in funding.
Then the problems started, linked above all to doubts about respect for privacy and on the management of information relating to subscribers, falling in love has ended, competition has arrived, the novelty effect has passed and the decline has begun: just 16 million downloads in the first quarter of 2023, according to data from Apptopiaand above all a collapse in the ranking of the US App Store, always significant to indicate current and future trends.
From before it was (more or less throughout July, August and September), now the app is steadily around the number 120 position. Practically invisible, in short.
Neither trolls nor influencers: the moment of BeReal
by Riccarlo Luna
Not everyone can be Facebook
It must be said that in the Italian App Store things are a bit different (at the moment the app is sixth in the general classification) due to a probable and predictable accordion effect, but the gist does not change: for BeReal, the risk of ending up in the cemetery of forgotten technology is absolutely real. Or forgotten social media, in good company together with temporary phenomena such as ClubhouseVine and Periscope, in that gray area where giants like Pinterest and Twitter, where things aren’t going exactly as Elon Musk tells them.
What the BeReal affair demonstrates, however it will end, is that it is (relatively) easy to reach the Olympus of social media network but staying there is another matter altogether. And that at the moment the only really strong players are the very young TikTokYouTube Shorts (which is young but has a historical brand behind it) and above all the products of Meta.
Despite all the criticisms, the accusations of “being like a boomer” and to count for nothing, Facebook is still today the most used social platform: its daily active users have been growing continuously since 2009, rising from 185 million then to 2 billion today. Two billion people that every day they choose to connect to the oldest of social networks means that around 40% of all people who access the Internet in the world do so to access Facebook. It’s true that they probably do less than they did 5-10 years ago and that very often they just watch (but still watch content that someone has posted), but in any case it is a huge number.
And it’s not the only number that makes Zuckerberg smile: if Facebook’s performance is added to that of WhatsAppMessenger e Instagram, we get to almost 3 billion active users per day. That’s right: about the 60% of those who access the Internet in the worlddoes this to access a Meta product.
@capoema