Ready for something new? BeReal is a photo-sharing app with a unique spin – it asks you to snap a photo of yourself at a random time and gives you two minutes to do it. That's it. That's the whole thing.
Who would do that, right??
Well, up until recently, not that many. Recently, many!
The two-year-old app, which hails from France, has been picking up steam in the last month and has hit a new peak this week.
Daily downloads, which our estimated show averaged around 4,000 for most of 2021, have been growing steadily in 2022. In January, daily downloads more than quadrupled to 20,000, and by March, downloads doubled to around 40,000, according to our estimates.
But that's not the end! Last Sunday, downloads climbed to 170,000. That's right, more than 400% increase, all in a single day. And it doesn't look like that's slowing down.
BeReal is now the 11th most downloaded app in the US App Store.
Like many of the apps du jour we've seen topping the App Store recently, most of BeReal's downloads came in recently. Of the 6.7 million downloads the app has seen since it launched in 2020, 4.9 million of downloads, or roughly 73%, came in 2022. Most of which are from the US and the UK.
College students are the app's main audience, where the app has been spreading organically, but there's more here. Photo apps have been rising to the top of the charts a bunch over the last few months. Some knowingly, others by luck, but at the end of the day, there's an obvious pattern here.
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