A new app is taking over: BeReal. This app is a new kind of social media letting its users post authentic photos that have to be taken when you receive the notification that “it’s time to BeReal.”

The app is meant to be a simpler, more realistic form of social media. To accomplish this, the app works as such: every day, at a different time, each user receives a notification saying, “It’s time to BeReal!” From there, you get two minutes to take a picture of what you’re doing right now – eliminating the possibility of a staged photo. Freshman Bailey Gray is a BeReal user and compared it to another popular app right now, Snapchat, and how you can choose to snap people based on what you look like. “…[With] BeReal, if you get the notification at a time like you kind of feel…obligated to do it at that time. So no matter what you look like or how you feel at that time, you’re kind of doing it just to see what other people are doing. It’s nice,” Gray said.

BeReal is also one way to connect with people that you’re not physically close to. Because the notifications come at a random time each day, it can act as a way to update your friends on what you’re doing at that moment. Senior Katherine Foe uses BeReal to keep up with her brother in college. “He could see what I was doing at home and I could see what he was doing at college. And now I use it to keep up with my friends that I don’t go to school with or like my older friends that are in college,” Foe said.

One way that BeReal users have described the app is casual. Typically, there isn’t an abundance of online friends on the app, so your photos are only being shared to a small circle of people. “I like it because it’s just really chill and it’s like, really laid back and you only usually have a few friends on it. So it’s just very intimate,” junior Lilia Johnson said.

Without a doubt, BeReal has proven to be the app to get right now. Its lack of social pressure and encouragement for staying authentic and transparent on social media are just a couple of reasons BeReal has grown in popularity lately.