Copying Instagram continues; This time from BeReal social network

Instagram has announced the testing of a new feature that is strangely similar to its similar example in the emerging social network BeReal.

Meta recently confirmed that it is internally prototyping a new feature for Instagram that looks suspiciously similar to BeReal, the buzzed-about new media app. Discovered by tech whistleblower Alessandro Palozzi, the feature dubbed “IG-Candid” mimics BeReal and prompts users to share everyday photos at random times.

Palozzi posted a screenshot of Instagram’s explanation of how this feature works in a Twitter post has published It is written in its text:

By adding users of the IG Candid service to your story, a notification will be activated for 2 minutes to record a photo and share it at different times every day.

This feature works exactly the same as the user experience of the BeReal social network. This service, which became famous last month and is currently the number one download among free apps on the App Store, sends a notification to the user at a random time of the day, giving him two minutes to use the front camera. And save and share your photos. This feature tries to somehow replace the pre-programmed examples of Instagram with the aim of sharing normal images of users and their daily lives.

In a statement to The Verge, Meta confirmed that it is testing the IG Candid feature. The company’s spokesperson, Christian P., said:

This feature is an internal prototype and has not yet been tested externally.

Based on this statement, we can see that there is no specific timetable for the public release of this feature and it may not even be released at all.

However, judging by how Meta and other social media giants have reacted to other popular apps over the years, it seems that Instagram will definitely respond to the growing popularity of the BeReal social network in order to maintain its position. In the past, Instagram, by copying Snapchat, added the popular feature of this program to its platform, and by providing the Rails feature, it gave an obvious answer to Tik Tok, which uses this feature.

Meta is not the first social media giant to try to copy other competing apps. The “Youtube Shorts” function (the possibility of making short videos on YouTube) is also a clear attempt by Google to make money from vertical short videos, and Twitter also copied a similar function used in Clubhouse by adding the Spaces feature. did

An interesting point is that Meta already has a history of copying the BeReal social network. Last month, around the same time the fledgling app was gaining popularity, Instagram rolled out a new feature called Dual, which lets users take photos or videos from their phone’s front and rear cameras simultaneously. After that, users quickly realized the similarities between this feature on BeReal and Instagram, but with the difference that the Dual feature allows you to record content whenever you want, without having to wait for a notification.

To deny Instagram’s chain of copycats, one of the platform’s former designers claimed that the Dual feature had actually been in development for several years and called its release coincident with BeReal’s explosion in popularity as a coincidence.