Stickers

The sticker tool searches Klipy and GIPHY, sends results as real stickers where the app on the other end supports them, and lets you build your own packs from photos already on your phone. It sits right next to GIFs in the toolbox and shares most of its settings.

Screenshot pending

Sticker search results, with the My stickers tab for your own packs.

Searching and sending

Open the tool from the toolbar and type to search Klipy and GIPHY, or switch to My stickers for packs you’ve built yourself. Tapping a result downloads and inserts it; while it’s downloading the tile shows a spinner in its place.

With the search box empty, a scrollable row of category chips (Trending, Love, Happy, Cute, Funny…) sits above the grid; tapping one runs it as a search, and tapping the active chip goes back to trending. It works the same as the GIF panel’s row, and like that one it steps aside as soon as you type. My stickers doesn’t get it: its pack chips already fill that job.

Android has no dedicated “this is a sticker” flag: the only signal a receiving app gets is the file’s MIME type, and WhatsApp in particular only recognizes its own private image/webp.wasticker type, not plain image/webp. So when the Send stickers as setting is set to Sticker, the keyboard offers that WhatsApp type first and falls back to a normal image if the field doesn’t advertise it. A source that isn’t WebP (an animated GIF result, say) can never go out with the sticker MIME (Android has no animated-WebP encoder), so it always sends as a plain image regardless of that setting.

If the field can’t take images at all, the tool doesn’t bother downloading first and failing after: it vibrates once and shows a standing notice instead, with results still visible underneath at 45% opacity so you can still long-press one to save or copy it (see Long-pressing a sticker below). If the field does take images but rejects this particular file even after the WebP→PNG fallback, the file lands on the system clipboard instead, with a toast telling you to paste it, the same thing the clipboard tool’s own image and file commits do when a field refuses them.

Screenshot pending

The standing notice a field that can't take images shows, with results dimmed underneath.

Long-pressing a sticker

Long-pressing a Klipy or GIPHY result opens a menu with three kinds of row:

• Save to a pack — “Save to a new pack” if you have none yet, or “Save to <pack name>” for each pack you’ve made. This is the only save path: there’s no way to pull a sticker back out of a chat someone sent you, only to keep one you were about to send yourself.
• Copy puts the sticker on the system clipboard instead of into the field, to paste wherever you like.
• Report opens a mail draft to the maintainer naming the provider, your search term, and the sticker’s id and URL, with room at the top to say what’s wrong with it. Nothing leaves the device on its own: the draft sits in your mail app for you to read, edit, or drop. Klipy and GIPHY search their own catalogues, so results arrive unvetted; this is where a bad one goes. GIFs have the same menu, minus the save rows.

Long-pressing a sticker from My stickers shows “Manage packs” (which jumps straight to the pack management screen covered below) and Copy. There’s no save row — you already have it — and no report row, since it’s your own file and there’s nobody to report it to.

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Long-press menu over a Klipy result: save to a pack, copy, or report.

My stickers and your own packs

My stickers is always its own tab or chip; your packs are never interleaved into the Klipy/GIPHY grid, in either source layout mode. With more than one pack, a second row of filter chips (All, then one per pack name) appears above the grid, and search there matches a sticker’s search words and its pack name together.

Building and managing packs happens in the app, not the keyboard: WM Keyboard›Tools›Stickers›Your stickers›Sticker packs.

• New pack starts one empty; Import a pack reads a .wmstickers file.
• Inside a pack, Add stickers opens the photo picker for up to 30 images in one trip. Each one is processed automatically: a still image is resized to 512×512 and re-encoded as WebP, trying progressively lower quality (90 down to 50) until it lands under 100 KB, matching WhatsApp’s static sticker spec. An animated source (GIF or animated WebP) is stored byte-for-byte instead, since Android has no animated-WebP encoder to re-compress it with; those are capped at 2 MB rather than the 100 KB still budget. Any single source file over 12 MB is refused before processing even starts.
• Pick exactly one still image and it opens in the sticker editor first, instead of being added as-is. Pick several and they’re all added the old way; an editor thirty times over isn’t a flow anyone wants. Either way the photo behind each sticker is kept for later editing, as described below.
• Per sticker, you can set its search words, reorder it within the pack, move it to a different pack, or delete it. Search words are one space-separated list of anything you’d want to type to find that sticker later, emoji included (“cat 😂 happy”). The first word doubles as the sticker’s name, which is what a screen reader reads out for it.
• Per pack, you can rename it, export it as a .wmstickers file to share or back up, or delete it; deleting warns you to export first if you want to keep a copy.
• A pack tops out at 200 stickers; you can have up to 50 packs total.

A sticker pack's management screen, with reorder and export controls.

The sticker editor

The editor opens two ways: picking a single still image from Add stickers, or tapping a sticker you already have and choosing Edit the image. Animated stickers don’t get it at all, since there’s no still to edit and no encoder to put an animation back together afterwards.

Everything happens on the 512×512 sticker canvas, and there are four tabs:

• Crop — drag to move the picture, pinch to zoom. The part inside the square is what’s kept; anything that isn’t square gets transparent bars rather than being stretched.
• Erase and Restore — a round brush with a size slider. Erase clears pixels to transparent, Restore paints them back. A ring the size of the brush appears in the middle of the canvas when you switch to either tab or move the slider, and fades once you stop, so you can see what you’re about to paint with before you paint with it. Undo goes back one stroke at a time, twelve deep.
• Border — the white or black outline that hugs the cut-out shape, WhatsApp-style, with a width slider from 0 (off) up to 24px. It traces whatever is left after erasing, so it’s most useful once the background is gone. The border is a setting rather than a stroke: sliding it back to 0 is its own undo, which is why the Undo button doesn’t touch it.

Remove the background does the cutout in one tap. It’s in the full build only, and even there the model isn’t in the APK: it comes from Google Play services on demand, so the first tap offers a download with a progress bar and then runs. If it can’t be fetched, the brushes still work and the screen says so. If it finds nothing recognizable as a subject (or would keep the entire image), it says that too and leaves your picture alone rather than erasing everything. In the lite build the button simply isn’t there.

Within one editing session an edit is destructive: cropping again after you’ve erased something warns you first, because a new crop throws the erasing away. Nothing is written until you press Save.

Between sessions it isn’t. When you add a sticker from a photo, the keyboard keeps that photo (resized to 1536px on its long edge, as WebP) alongside your packs, together with the edit you made: where you cropped, what you erased, the border, and even the brush size you were using. Edit the image reopens the photo with all of that still on it, so a second pass picks up where you left off instead of starting over. Change the border, widen the crop, erase a bit more, then save again.

A resumed edit opens on the Erase tab rather than Crop, since the crop is already made and a stray pan there is the one gesture that would throw the erasing away. Undo starts empty each time you open the editor: it covers the strokes of this session, and “Crop again” is what clears an old cut-out (it asks first).

Stickers that arrived some other way (saved from Klipy or GIPHY, imported in a pack) have no separate photo behind them, so they reopen as themselves. The first time you edit one, the version you’re replacing is kept as its original, and from then on it resumes like any other.

None of this leaves the phone. Exporting a .wmstickers pack writes the manifest and the finished stickers only, the settings backup’s sticker section walks the same list, and Android’s own cloud backup and device transfer skip the folder entirely. It does take up space, so WM Keyboard›About›Storage›Sticker packs lists it as its own row (“Images you made stickers from”) and you can delete just that row to get the space back, keeping every sticker. Deleting it costs the resumable edits too: those stickers go back to reopening as themselves.

Importing a .wmstickers file

A .wmstickers file is a ZIP with a pack.json manifest and one image per sticker. Import is deliberately forgiving of hand-written or slightly malformed manifests (it repairs what it can rather than rejecting the whole file) and reports what happened:

• Imported successfully, with a note of anything it had to fix along the way.
• “No stickers could be read out of that pack” if the manifest named stickers but none of them survived; this is reported rather than silently importing an empty pack.
• “That file is not a WMKeyboard sticker pack” if the format tag doesn’t match.
• “You already have 50 packs. Delete one first” if you’re at the pack limit.

An import is also capped against oversized or booby-trapped files: at most 500 entries and 64 MB total per archive.

Sticker packs are excluded from backups by default

Sticker packs are an optional section of the app’s full settings backup, but they’re off by default because images make the backup file large. Turn them on in the Backup screen if you want packs included, or export a pack individually from its own screen instead.

Options

WM Keyboard›Tools›Stickers

Stickers isn’t pinned to the toolbar by default. It lives in the toolbox alongside GIFs until you pin it. Reach the settings below from Tools in the app.

• Sticker packs — jumps to the pack management screen above. Only shown under Stickers, not under GIFs.
• Full-screen picker — WM Keyboard›Tools›Stickers›Layout — default on. The toolbar, emoji row, and symbol row step aside and the search box moves into the row they leave behind, so the grid gets the full keyboard height. Shared with the GIF tool.
• Klipy API key and GIPHY API key — WM Keyboard›Tools›Stickers›Sources & API keys — both blank by default, shared with the GIF tool. Either one alone is enough; every source you’ve configured a key for shows up as a chip in the panel. Klipy replaced Tenor after Tenor’s API was retired.
• Send stickers as — WM Keyboard›Tools›Stickers›Sending — Sticker or Image, default Sticker. Only shown under Stickers: it governs what the sticker panel commits, and the GIF panel has its own Send GIFs as on its own page.
• Multiple sources — Tabs or Mixed, default Tabs. Tabs gives every configured source its own chip, including My stickers. Mixed collapses Klipy/GIPHY into one “Online” chip and keeps My stickers as a second chip.
• Content filter — Off/Low/Medium/High, default Medium. Maps to Klipy’s and GIPHY’s own content rating.
• Results for each search, under WM Keyboard›Tools›Stickers›Results: a slider from 6 to 48, default 24. How many stickers one search or the trending view loads. Your own packs ignore it, so My stickers always shows everything that matches, however long the list. Shared with the GIF tool.

Both tools are among the ones the setup wizard suggests enabling, and neither needs a particular edition: the gating here is an API key, not the build.

Details and edge cases

• The WhatsApp sticker MIME is an unofficial, undocumented contract. image/webp.wasticker appears in no public spec; it’s a private convention both WhatsApp and Gboard happen to implement. It can change without notice, which is why there’s a fallback chain rather than a single hardcoded rule.
• A field that only takes images, not stickers, still gets a normal image. The sticker-vs-image choice is best-effort on top of whatever the field actually advertises; nothing is ever silently dropped over MIME mismatch alone: the clipboard fallback only kicks in when every image MIME candidate is rejected.
• Save and report don’t apply to your own stickers. Long-pressing something from My stickers offers pack management and Copy only; there’s nothing to save (you already have it) and nothing to report (nobody served it to you).
• A source already at spec is left alone. If a picked image is already a 512×512 WebP under 100 KB, it’s stored as-is rather than re-encoded.
• One process, one store, but two independent views of it. The keyboard and the settings app run in the same app process and share the same on-disk pack store, so every mutator saves immediately rather than batching. Each side still caches its own snapshot of the packs, though, so the keyboard checks a cheap size-and-timestamp signal against the manifest and only reloads when it’s actually changed, rather than re-parsing it on every keystroke.
• Multiple sources and Content filter don’t get a restore button. Every other row on this screen grows a small restore button once you move it off its shipped value. Those two are drawn as a bare segmented row under a heading rather than as full setting rows, so there’s nowhere to hang one, and undoing them means picking Tabs and the middle filter level back yourself. The Klipy and GIPHY key fields have no button either, though clearing the box does the same job there.
• Packs need the device unlocked. Sticker packs live in app-private storage that isn’t available before you unlock the device after a restart, so the sticker tool isn’t usable from a locked-screen field the way some other tools are.

See also GIFs for the tool this one shares its settings and layout with, and Emoji picker & search for the other route into expressive content on this keyboard.