This Spaniard wants to dethrone Instagram with a real ‘app’ and without filters

David Aliagas (Tarragona, 2000) handles the Internet as well as could be expected from any of the members of the Z generation, who sometimes seem to have been born with a mobile phone with all the pre-installed ‘apps’ in hand. The young man, who is now 22 years old, began his career in networks on horseback between those two monsters of ‘social media’ called Instagram and TikTok. In 2020, while studying at university in England, he came across a new tool of French origin called BeReal which, to his astonishment, offered just the opposite of the great ‘apps’ he had tried until then: sharing a life without access to aesthetic filters and without the possibility of curing the content. In the case of BeReal, everything happens by uploading a photo a day in which the front and rear cameras of the mobile are combined. Every 24 hours, the user receives a notification that can arrive at any time; while he’s brushing his teeth, he’s taking the dog out or sprawled out in the fetal position on the couch. No tricks or posturing. The image should upload in less than two minutes. If you run out of time, you will have to wait until the next day. When he uploaded his first BeReal, accompanied by his roommates while having brunch, Aliagas was clear that the platform, almost an antithesis of Instagram, had great potential. «It was still in a very early phase, but it caught my attention. It completely broke with the stereotypes of other platforms and made my life easier. Here you post once a day and then you forget », he says. And he was right. In this 2022, the platform has become one of the great technological phenomena. It has experienced a growth of more than 300% and has increased its number of users to ten million unique daily. In addition, it has managed to exceed 100 million total downloads in just two years of life. This is what the images look like in BeReal The strong impression that the ‘app’ made on him led Aliagas to get in touch with Alexis Barreyat, one of the young French creators of the application, requesting a job directly from him. By making noise, he managed to become part of the project as growth director when it was still in its infancy. His function, since then, is to get the tool to penetrate as many countries as possible, and that forces him to spend long periods with the suitcase in tow. During the last weeks he has passed through India or Bali. The manager also exploits competing social networks, such as TikTok, where he has 123,000 followers, to bring BeReal closer to the youngest. In one of his most popular videos, he explains that he wants to “change this shallow world a bit with an ‘app’ that doesn’t make fun of our mental health, like Instagram does” with its constant projection of perfection. It should be remembered that, according to internal information from Meta, a technology to which it belongs, the ‘influencers’ fetish application worsens the self-esteem problems of one in three young people. When Aliagas looks to the future, he does so with ambition; he trusts that if the present of BeReal is promising, what is to come will be, directly, extraordinary. The plan is for the tool, which will add new functions soon, to become a competitor to be reckoned with in the twisted business of social networks. “We want to convince as many users as possible to share their lives without filters. Hopefully, when the time comes, they will look at their past posts and see a completely real life, “says the manager. Instagram wants to clone it The development of the ‘app’, cemented especially by a community of users aged between 16 and 25, the most valuable for any social network, has drawn the attention of many experts in ‘social media’. Some even point out that they are not surprised that the competition is trying to copy it. «When a new platform breaks into the sector and experiences high growth, it becomes a focus of interest for the rest of the applications and services. Depending on the success it achieves, the strategies can range from the acquisition to the assimilation of similar functionalities to avoid the migration of users to that new environment”, says Silvia Martínez, director of the Master’s Degree in Social Media, Management and Strategy at the University Open of Catalonia (UOC). TikTok announced this week the arrival of a new tool called Now in the application that works exactly the same as BeReal: the user receives an alert at an undetermined time of day to immediately share a video or photo that is captured through the app. front and rear camera of the ‘smartphone’. MORE INFORMATION news No Instagram is not only looking at TikTok: this is the functionality that it wants to clone from the social network of the moment And the Chinese ‘app’ is not the only one that jumps on the bandwagon of naturalness; According to the leaks, Instagram, an ‘app’ that has been immersed in controversy for months for worsening the self-esteem problems of young people, is finalizing the arrival of this same function in the ‘app’; something that he has already done in the past with the vertical videos of TikTok or with the ‘stories’, cloned from the ephemeral videos of Snapchat.