The fact that WhatsApp offers stickers is nothing new anymore. However, animated stickers will soon be added. In the latest beta version, 2.20.194.7 in the case of Android and 2.20.70.26 for Apple iOS, animated stickers can at least be viewed. However, the new function has not yet been fully implemented.
The feature is gradually being distributed to beta users and requires three components:
- The possibility to view animated stickers. If you can, you can save animated stickers and then send them yourself.
- The possibility of importing animated stickers from third-party providers – i.e. installing sticker packs from third parties.
- The possibility to get animated sticker packs from the WhatsApp store.
In the first step, only the first point, i.e. looking at animated stickers, was activated in the WhatsApp beta – and not for all beta users. In addition, animated stickers do not yet appear as a loop – so they play their animation once and that’s it. Whether WhatsApp wants to change this until the final distribution is open.
At the moment, you shouldn’t really expect to find animated stickers in the wild anyway: Since you can’t get them anywhere, you can only send them on to users who either have already created animated stickers for WhatsApp as developers or have received them and they can now send on – probably a very manageable circle.
After all, you can see that the function is slowly approaching completion. The next step should be to provide animated stickers in beta via the WhatsApp Store.
