The popular social media app BeReal users may recognise a feature in the photo-sharing app owned by Meta Platforms Inc., which offers its users new methods to share and interact with friends. Instagram will begin testing Candid Stories in South Africa on Tuesday. Users will receive a daily message asking them to take and post two unedited photographs using the front and rear cameras, similar to the prompts given by BeReal, which has lately racked up millions of users. Instagram didn’t specify a launch date or if Candid Stories will be available worldwide.

All users will start receiving Notes, a second new feature, on Tuesday. These friend-focused status updates show up at the top of the inbox. The improvements to Instagram come as young people swarm to more recent applications like BeReal and TikTok. They also address some recent complaints that Instagram postings sometimes appear to be unduly edited or unauthentic, with sponsored material and advertisements displacing friend updates.

Instagram goes candid

BeReal, which debuted in 2020, has gained popularity by positioning itself as a genuine, uncensored alternative to the carefully managed feeds on Instagram and TikTok. Users are requested to snap a front-and-back photo and submit it at a random time each day. Any posts that appear more than two minutes after the prompt are flagged as being late.

Since its debut up to December 11th, BeReal has had 73.7 million installations, according to sensor tower, which monitors app performance metrics. The software was the most popular in Apple’s App Store earlier this year, but Sensor Tower said that its growth has halted recently.

Users of Instagram’s Candid Stories are still prompted daily, and each story has a timestamp so your friends can see when you shared. But unlike BeReal, users may add text or squiggles to their daily posts, and they can always choose not to get the daily notice. (They aren’t additionally given a tardy mark.) Prior to this, Instagram allowed users to concurrently use front and rear cameras.

According to Meta, there are more than two billion users of Instagram each month. Concerns have been raised about how the app and its parent business would affect younger users. Meanwhile, several users, especially famous people who have long supported the network, have pushed the business to “make Instagram Instagram again” by giving friends’ postings precedence over advertisements. Tessa Lyons-Laing, Instagram’s director of product management, explains that the new features are meant to provide users with additional opportunities to interact with their social networks.