Tech

What Are Whatsapp Stickers?

Even after smileys and emojis have become so popular, lately, the last few years have seen the rising trend of stickers in instant messaging apps such as Hike and Line was soon adopted by giants such as Whatsapp. But what are these stickers and why are they becoming so popular?

What Is A Sticker?

A sticker is the next evolution of the emoji and has become a very popular way of communicating emotive reactions to messages. A sticker design (ออกแบบ สติ๊กเกอร์, which is the text in Thai) usually shows or expresses some primary emotion or catchphrase. However, stickers have continued to become much more elaborate and creative, often deriving their designs from pop culture and meme references. Stickers are very lightweight, consume less file space, and unlike images, take much less time to process and send across messages.

History Of Stickers

The concept of stickers was first introduced by the Korean messaging app called Line. Line wanted to capitalize on the young Japanese market, thus they focused on the creation of their stickers to resonate with the youth’s image of what is considered funny. Due to this, stickers are often found to be loud, expressive, and colorful to be attention-grabbing. Stickers soon started to be slowly adopted by other popular messengers. Eventually, it blew up in the west too after Facebook and Kik also introduced support for stickers. Snapchat, Instagram, and Whatsapp were some of the most recent companies to adopt this technology.

Emojis Vs Stickers

Emojis are a part of the unified code that comes along with an operating system, and hence are compatible across multiple apps. However, the amount of emojis available is fixed and rather limited. Compared to this, stickers are made by third-party applications. Because of this, they often are not cross-compatible and only work within that application. The tradeoff of this is that sticker design can have much more freedom and creativity because the possibilities are nonstandard and endless.

Sticker Collections:

A very unique application of stickers was to become collectibles. Much like trading cards, purchasable stickers also became very popular collector’s items. Stickers based on movies such as The Avengers, or Star Wars, as well as anime like Naruto and Dragon Ball and many other franchises are collected by people across the internet.

Stickers are a new technology that has taken the world by storm, and a majority of smartphone owners claim that they use stickers very often in their daily messages too!

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