Originality is a useless language, not less than on the earth of social media apps. TikTok’s held up as the preferred app for its curated, AI-based content material feed, but it surely’s realized there’s a rising market of younger people who find themselves uninterested in scrolling via celebrities’ incoherent buzzing and algorithm-based feeds. Unfortunately, as an alternative of making one thing new, its opted to straight up steal one other firm’s concept to be used in its personal app.

The ByteDance-owned firm mentioned Thursday that they’re experimenting with a brand new characteristic known as TikTok Now over the approaching weeks, and it’s now accessible by U.S. customers via the app and in different areas via a separate TikTok Now app. Just just like the once-a-day picture app BeReal, TikTok Now says customers are prompted to seize what they’re doing at a second utilizing each entrance and rear cameras. Users will obtain each day prompts for a photograph or 10-second video to share with family and friends.

If that new characteristic rings any bells, that’s as a result of it’s precisely what the app BeReal already does. BeReal has promoted itself as an app that runs in the other way of curated algorithm-based feeds, as an alternative asking customers to ship a photograph or a brief video to their associates, and household each day. There’s no filters or followers, and pictures are taken at random occasions within the day utilizing each the entrance and rear telephone cameras.

BeReal got here onto the scene in 2020 and is presently listed because the #1 most downloaded social networking app on the Apple App Store and stays in style on the Google Play Store. It’s a far cry from the billions upon billions who’ve collectively downloaded TikTok and Instagram, however analysis agency Apptopia wrote final month that BeReal has been downloaded 43.3 million occasions since December 2019, seeing an enormous bounce in downloads in 2022.

BeReal’s founder Alexis Barreyat and BeReal itself declined to touch upon this story or on different apps copying its designs, with the corporate saying they weren’t doing interviews right now.

It appears the world’s hottest social media app, made well-known for its AI-based feed, is attempting to supply extra localized and curated content material. TikTok additionally just lately let it slip they have been engaged on “Nearby” feeds to indicate you video that hits nearer to house, which is a characteristic already employed by the likes of Snapchat via its Snap map and Instagram with its picture map characteristic.

TikTok wrote that TikTok Now customers can ship their movies to mutual associates however may also choose to share with the broader TikTok neighborhood, although the default is for associates solely. Still, the flexibility to share these fast movies to a large viewers is a marked distinction between BeReal. The French-made app has made public statements that it desires to seize “real life… free from the need to create, cultivate, and amass influence.”

Of course, Instagram can also be apparently trying to copycat the favored French-made app. Leaked pictures reveal the Meta-owned picture app is engaged on one thing presently named “IG Candid Challenges” that prompts customers to take a candid picture at completely different occasions within the day. And in case you assume that sounds precisely like BeReal, you’re not the one one.

While Instagram is attempting to sweep up any new and in style concept available on the market and is already doing its damndest to repeat TikTok via its proliferation of Reels and short-form video, it’s struggled to get its customers curious about these new options.

Knowing that BeReal has solely began to grow to be in style this yr reveals simply how dialed on the earth’s largest social networks are on sustaining dominance. In impact, we’re reaching a degree the place the largest social apps are in a rat race to compete for concepts, whichever concepts appear to be catching on among the many youthful demographics. If solely these corporations would understand extra folks would recognize apps that didn’t harvest their information, then possibly we wouldn’t really feel so dangerous about their streaks of unoriginality.