Send your boss a fake photo of "birds invading the construction site": how MaybeReal got 88k views through a Spanish-language prank account

A small AI prank-photo app. The product is much like dozens of others, yet it got 88k installs on Google Play in two months and charted in the US Photography top-grossing list. Its engine is a creator program that pays by views: a batch of Spanish- and Italian-language prank accounts put the same line under every video, "I made the fake photos with @MaybeReal." This piece covers how it works, how it makes money, why the iOS version disappeared, and whether you could run the same playbook in another language.

A prank with 35M views

On Aug 15, 2026, TikTok account @bromaschidas1 posted a video. From the comments, the gist seems to be this (inferred): the screen recording is a WhatsApp chat with the boss, saved as "Jefe Malo" (Bad Boss). The fake photos show a freshly poured concrete slab covered in birds and footprints, a worker named "José" chasing them off, and the last line "The birds are attacking José!"

The caption is one line: "las fotos fake las hago con la app @maybeReal hahaha" (I make the fake photos with the MaybeReal app, haha). By Nov 6 it had 35.1M views, 1.89M likes, and 520k shares (TikHub, 11-06). The top comment, with 228k likes: "🤣 when the boss reads the message." Scrolling down, someone asks "what's this app called?" and gets 252 likes.

Five days earlier, on Aug 10, the same account posted another video with 26.5M views. Its caption spelled out the answer: "Update: I use @maybeReal for the pranks (lots of people DM me), it's on the App Store."

The account has only 103k followers and 51 posts.

What it is: one tap for fake-looking-real photos

Open the app, upload a photo of your house, your car, or yourself, pick a template, and in seconds you get an image: a stranger in the kitchen, police at the door, a smashed car, a "boyfriend" beside you. The web version's "Homeless" template comes in four poses (sleeping, rummaging through the fridge, sitting, standing), with the note "Upload an environment photo, indoor or outdoor, with good lighting" (maybereal.app, 11-06).

Templates follow trends: Halloween, Ronaldo, Messi, Trump, Taylor Swift, plus animated versions made with video models. The Play Store listing says "viral AI pranks" and "filters updated constantly to keep up with the latest social media trends."

It's made by Cerebri Virtual Corporation, which has only this one app. Support is a Gmail address and the privacy policy is hosted on GitHub Pages. It looks like a small team.

The demand didn't originate with it. On 2025 October, the "AI homeless man breaks into your house" prank went viral in the US and got coverage from People and CBS News. Police in several places issued warnings telling people not to scare family with it or file false reports. That wave used Google's Nano Banana, which required writing your own prompts. MaybeReal turned it into choosing a template and tapping once.

Where users come from: a creator hub that pays for views

The developer's website homepage has a "Creator Hub" banner: "Become a creator, promote MaybeReal, get paid. Track your views, pay by results, withdraw anytime." TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook are all included (cerebri-virtual-corporation.com, 11-06).

Searching TikTok shows the results. The accounts below all use nearly the same sentence pattern in their bios and per-video captions:

Source: TikHub, 11-06. Also an Italian account @antonio.prank, a French account @mikemike0558, and a few others.

The @funny.bromas video with 19.5M views follows the same formula: a daughter texts her dad that she crashed the car, and he explodes. Then she sends a photo where the car belongs to Ronaldo. Dad immediately changes his tune, tells her to "kneel and apologize," and says he'll pay for the repair (inferred from the comments). The top comment, with 390k likes: "Dad runs over to beat you because you almost hurt the 'Commander-in-Chief.'" Others say in the comments "it's all staged," but that doesn't stop the views or people downloading.

These accounts share a few traits: only a few dozen posts each, almost all of them pranks, almost always mentioning MaybeReal, with the same lines rephrased. They're likely accounts opened specifically for this program, possibly run in bulk by a single studio (inferred, unverified). The official TikTok account @mayberealapp has 29k followers, and most of its videos get only a thousand or two views. Nearly all the volume comes from these creator accounts.

The playbook works because of the content itself: the first question people have after watching a prank video is "what app is that?" and the answer is already written in the caption.

Where users are: Italy, Spain, Latin America

The Google Play charts line up exactly with the creators' languages. In Oct 29 it ranked 31 on the Italy Photography free chart, 80 in Spain, 74 in Mexico, and 111 in Argentina. By Nov 6 it had dropped to 92, 179, off the chart, and 170 respectively. The US Photography top-grossing chart had it at 162 to 185 for a long stretch (Google Play charts, 10-29 to 11-06).

Source: Google Play, 11-06. Play installs update every few days. 10-31 it jumped by 7,760, and in the last two days it's been roughly 900 a day. Rating: 4.7 stars.

The peak is clearly late October, and it's declining now.

Where the iOS version went

It actually started on iPhone: the iOS version launched around the end of 2025, and the captions on August's hit videos say "available on the App Store." The Play version didn't go live until Sep 7, and on Sep 14 a five-star Spanish review said: "Didn't expect Android to have it too, it used to be iPhone only."

On Oct 17, the iOS version was pulled from the App Store (recorded by AppBrain; 11-06 Apple's API shows it can't be found in the US or Spain storefronts). No reason was given. The official TikTok bio now reads "available on web and Android." The most likely cause is content: using celebrity faces as templates and making fake "police at the door" or "stranger breaking in" photos that scare people and could prompt police reports easily runs into platform rules (inferred).

This also explains the Android wave in October: creators kept posting, iOS was closed off, and people who wanted it had to go to Play or the web (inferred).

Where the money comes from

Two lines of revenue. On Play, a Spanish user's September review mentioned a "3-day free subscription, cancel anytime." Another complained: "Every time I try to upload a photo it won't let me, it keeps asking me to pay, I know it charges me every week." So: free trial first, then a weekly subscription. The in-app purchases on Play run from $11.99 to $119.99 per item, and the web version deducts 100 points per image generated. Late October also had a limited-time Halloween offer (Play update notes).

It charted at 160 to 185 on the US Photography top-grossing list, which means people are paying, but how much isn't disclosed, so it's hard to estimate.

Who it's competing with

The most telling is the fourth row: the products are nearly identical, but distribution makes all the difference. Nobody seems to be copying its creator playbook either. In nearly 90 days of searching X, I couldn't find a single post discussing MaybeReal. The English-speaking world basically doesn't know it exists.

If it were you

The takeaway: Don't copy the product, copy the distribution. The "creator hub that pays per view + standardized captions" model could still work in a language nobody has tried yet. But the prank category carries takedown risk, and the peak has already passed.

Who it's for: 1 to 2 people, with at least one person who can work with a local small-account partner in a non-English language (Portuguese for Brazil, German, Turkish, Indonesian, Arabic, 11-06). Nobody similar seems to be active in these languages, but that doesn't mean there isn't anyone. You also need to ship a template app or web page in a week using ready-made image and video model APIs.

Who it's not for: Anyone hoping to win on product experience (there's no tech moat here, the core is generic models); anyone who only wants the English market (Nano Banana is free in English, and Starrd is already doing SEO there); anyone who only wants the App Store (MaybeReal was pulled from iOS).

How to do it: Launch on Android and web together, don't bet everything on one store. Pick templates that make people ask "what did you use to make this": a car getting hit, someone breaking into the house, getting a "celebrity" message. Avoid real police, real celebrity faces, and injury themes, which get reported most. Better to have fewer hits than a takedown. Pricing should copy the original: a 3-day trial that converts to a weekly subscription, then credit packs.

How to get users: First set up a creator hub: sign-up, enter your own account, pay out by views, allow withdrawals. Then find local TikTok prank accounts with 10K to 100K followers and offer them a standard caption ("I made the photo with @yourapp") and a bio credit. Check daily which accounts and templates are getting views, and put money behind those. MaybeReal's hits all came from accounts like this, each video reaching several million to tens of millions of views.

Timing: Launch before 2026 December so you catch the Christmas-to-New-Year stretch (pranking family, "Christmas present got wrecked" type themes). After that comes 1 April Fool's Day, a holiday in many language markets and the biggest prank moment of the year.

Signs you got it wrong: (1) MaybeReal's Play version also gets pulled, or Google tightens its "deceptive AI images" policy, which means the category is closing; (2) you've run 10+ accounts in a new language for a full month and no single video passes 500K views, so the trend hasn't taken off there; (3) refunds and one-star reviews from your first 1,000 paying users exceed half, which means "one prank and done" and the weekly plan isn't holding people.

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Data and sources: Google Play store pages, charts and install counts (10-29 to 11-06); TikTok creator profiles, videos and comments (TikHub, 11-06); the developer site cerebri-virtual-corporation.com Creator Hub (11-06); maybereal.app template pages (11-06); iOS removal per AppBrain records, rechecked with Apple's lookup API (11-06); the "AI homeless prank" trend per People and CBS coverage from 2025 October; competitor ratings from Apple's lookup API and the Starrd author's own claims. Anything marked "inferred" is inference.