Three words used to make people stop whatever they were doing to snap a picture in the allotted two minutes after the notification airing the infamous words. Now, “Time to BeReal” amounts to almost nothing. The mobile app BeReal’s debut in 2020 did not initially catch the spark of millions of users until two years later, when people would hop on to update a timely picture of what they were doing in the moment on the app.

A wave of popularity occupied the app for the next year with new updates on notification formatting, post times, and reaction features. Many saw BeReal as a way to express their authenticity since there are no filters or warning when a notification will come. Unlike typical social media where photos can be edited, BeReal does not offer any photo editing, and one can never be sure when they will get notified to post.

Participants receive an alert on their phones once a day indicating time to take a photo in the moment, or within two minutes before the submission is considered ‘late’. The picture would capture a front-facing selfie and back facing photo at the same time. After posting, users then have access to their friends’ posts, and can react to other BeReals with a selfie.

However, as 2023 came to pass, BeReal began to lose its once high admiration among teens as large amounts of users stopped posting their day-to-day activities on the app. Larger social media companies such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Tiktok quickly adapted the popular concept of taking a front and back facing photo at the same time, in turn causing teens to slowly wane off use of the app.

Although there are still millions of people on the app, many teens have abandoned it. This decrease in application leaves the question: Do teens not want to be real anymore?