A new Instagram feature looks suspiciously like BeReal

Instagram is trialling a new feature and it looks oddly familiar.

According to Alessandro Paluzzi, a developer known for his ability to reverse-engineer apps and discover unpublished features, the social media platform is launching Candid Challenges which asks people to take quick snaps of what they are up to at a random point in the day, using rear and front cameras.

When the photo is taken, it goes to people's story, and hmm this sounds like something we've heard of...

BeReal, which was launched in 2019 and has surged in popularity over the last few months, is an app which sends users a notification at a random time of day, every day, encouraging them to be "real" and take a photo using rear and front cameras of whatever possibly mundane thing they are doing at the time.

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If users participate, they get to see and react to their friends' posts as well, and posts expire the following day whenever the next BeReal notification is sent.

An Instagram spokesperson confirmed to engadgetthat the feature is an "internal prototype" that is "not testing externally", but declined to provide additional details.

But people on social media were quick to draw comparisons between the feature and BeReal:

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