Stickers have been a big part of WhatsApp’s feature set since 2018 when it was made available to both Android and iOS versions of the app. Animated stickers made their way to WhatsApp a couple of years later, with not much changing since then, barring some minor improvements. Despite going toe-to-toe with some of thebest messaging appsin the business today, the Meta-owned platform didn’t allow users to create their own stickers from photos. That could be changing soon for Android users, with the latest beta version of the app featuring a dedicated sticker maker/editor.
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This inclusion was discovered by the WhatsApp sleuths atWABetaInfo, who found it inversion 2.24.6.5of WhatsApp beta for Android. However, sideloading this particular version didn’t work for me, which makes sense given that it’s only rolling out to a handful of beta testers at the moment.
The inclusion is apparent at first glance, with users finding a newCreatetab within the stickers menu on WhatsApp. This lets you instantly access any image on your phone and turn it into a sticker. In addition to this method, people can also create a new sticker using an existing image inside a WhatsApp conversation. Just open the photo, and tap the overflow menu on the top right to find the newCreate stickeroption, as illustrated by the second screenshot above.
Tapping a sticker you’ve already sent in the chat opens a menu with two options —Add to favoritesandEdit sticker. The former option gives you easy access to the sticker for future use while tapping theEdit stickerbutton opens the image editor with suggestions shown in a horizontal row at the bottom of the screen.
We can’t help but feel that WhatsApp for Android is quite late to the party here since its iOS counterpart first teased the feature back in May 2023, with the beta going up in January this year. Moreover, the all-new sticker editor is now widely available in the stable version of WhatsApp for iOS, so we hope it won’t take long before it’s widely available forAndroid phones.
In a somewhat related development, a WhatsApp beta last month revealed the potential arrival ofanimated stickers powered by Lottie. This framework enables superior animations and lossless scaling, adding more emotion to your customized stickers. Although the current WebP-based stickers perform decently, support for Lottie will no doubt take the stickers experience to a whole new level.
