Social media app BeReal tops Australian download charts

Social media app BeReal has taken Gen Z by storm, rising to the top of download charts around the world.

Touted as an antidote to highly-staged platforms like Instagram, the French-designed BeReal is all about capturing and sharing a 'real' moment, according to some of its users.

But experts also flagged its lack of monetisation - one of its perceived draw-cards among younger people - may mean it is harvesting user data instead.

Every day at a different time, BeReal users are simultaneously notified to capture and share a photo in the space of two minutes.

The app takes an image using both the front and back camera so users can see what their friends are up to at a single moment in the day.

University of Wollongong senior lecturer Dr Chris Moore said the app's sense of "candidness" was a big draw-card for younger users who were accustomed to carefully cultivating an aesthetic for Instagram.

"It's more playful," he said.

"That candid prompt really helps to reduce the anxiety paralysis that can come with Instagram and the kind of performance of persona that requires quite a lot of thinking about."

While Dr Moore said there is no such thing as 'real' or 'fake' on social media, the app had found a niche in rejecting Instagram's highly-cultivated style.

One University of Wollongong student said it had "tickled the niche for Gen Z."

University of Queensland Associate Professor Nicholas Carah said the phenomenon was part of a pattern of newer generations searching for something of their own.

"There's always this dynamic of young people looking for a space of their own," Professor Carah said.

"There's this drift of young people wanting to post messier, looser, more intimate stuff and share it with their friends."

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The app is booming among young people, especially in universities.

"What happens on Instagram is that you see all these models that are really skinny, you have all the negative repercussions of advertisement, but BeReal doesn't have that," said UOW student Tori-lee Featon.

"I think there's less of a pressure to look pretty, or to be your aesthetic on BeReal, because the whole point of it is to just post, so it's kind of refreshing to be on an app that's not so polluted," she said.

At the moment, BeReal is funded by investors and does not have an advertising or a subscription model.

While students said the lack of advertising was a draw-card for the app, it has left experts questioning how the business will make money.

"There's no basis for influencer sponsorship, advertising, that's not there," Dr Moore said.

"I'm wondering if they're not making money from users, they're probably harvesting data," he said.

"For me, that's screaming facial recognition."

Apps in the past have been created solely for the purpose of training facial recognition technology, Dr Moore said, and this could be a possibility for BeReal.

Professor Carah said the app's options are likely to either make people pay to use it, start advertising, or to be bought out by another company.

The creators may soon be reaching that inflection point which may see it change form, he said.