What you need to know
- A new sticker editor feature has appeared in the latest WhatsApp beta for Android.
- The feature allows users to turn any image on their phone into a sticker.
- Currently, this is only available to some users, with the expectation that it will be rolled out to more in the coming weeks.
WhatsApp regularly introduces updates to improve the user experience – some practical, some more for fun. The latest beta update falls firmly into the latter camp and introduces a new sticker editor feature for Android users to play with.
Beat update 2.24.6.5, as reported by WABetaInfo (via Android Police), finally brings the sticker editor feature to Android beta testers. This tool promises to allow users to create stickers from any images they have on their phones. Users will be able to do this in one of two ways: either select the new “create” option that appears on the sticker keyboard or access the image by going to the overflow menu and selecting “create sticker.” Either option appears to be fairly straightforward to use.
Users can also edit existing stickers they’ve already created by selecting them and tapping the “edit sticker” option. This opens the image editor, where users can select from a range of different sticker types found at the bottom of the screen.
This dovetails with a previous beta update, 2.24.5.10, from February 2024. In that update, WhatsApp sought to introduce Lottie support to enable users to send animated stickers to their contacts. Lottie allows users to add movements, transitions, and effects, as well as resize them without losing any quality. Between these two updates, stickers could become significantly more personalized than ever before on WhatsApp.
Stickers aren’t a completely new feature, with options to include pre-made stickers in your conversations since 2018. But creating stickers from your photos is a big step forward. The sticker editor feature was first spotted in an iOS beta update in January. It’s taken a couple of months for it to arrive on Android for some beta users. The expectation is that it will start rolling out to more users in the coming weeks. Encouragingly, though, the sticker editor is already available in the stable version of iOS, so hopefully, it won’t take too long before this feature is available to all Android WhatsApp users.
