If you use WhatsApp, you may indulge from time to time in an emoji or even a GIF, depending on your age. As a millennial, I have been informed by younger generations that GIFs are so 2000-and-late, just like that reference.
Perhaps WhatsApp users of all ages can agree that the use of stickers is quite fun though, and now the firm has updated its app for iPhone and Android so that it’s much easier to make stickers in the first place.
Stickers are available to send in pre-made packs, or you can create your own using your photo library. Simply select a photo and WhatsApp will try to lasso the main picture, be it of a person, animal or last night’s pepperoni pizza, and the tech usually does a good job of cutting it out accurately.
You’ve been able to make stickers for a while, but making sticker packs, a collection of your stickers, was a bit of a headache. In the latest version of WhatsApp you no longer have to leave the app to quickly make a sticker pack, which you can then save or even send to someone.
You could previously make and send individual stickers as messages, but now you can select from your existing stickers to create your own pack, and then share that pack with friends for them to add to their library.
Say you’ve just been for a night out with friends and snapped a load of fun photos, you can quickly create stickers of the best shots and add them to your recent stickers. From there, you can select several and then create a sticker pack.
Now you have that pack, you can send it to the group chat and everyone can forever have the best shots in sticker form to send back and forth for the next few weeks.
It’s a small update but one that underlines just how many new tools WhatsApp has recently added to its app after several years of hardly any real new features. The firm added a dozen new things recently including tappable reactions, document scanning for iPhone users and smoother video call performance.
The other notable addition recently for UK WhatsApp users has been Meta AI, a feature I am much less enthused about. Meta, WhatsApp’s owner, says the chatbot-like artificial intelligence now thrust upon you in the app is optional, but you can’t switch it off, and any message or request that tags Meta AI can be read by Meta.
Living in the UK means using WhatsApp is practically essential. I’ll be much more likely to be creating a sticker pack in 2025 than using Meta AI, though.
