Sticker Updates: September 30, 2019

Hello Developers,

Thank you for your interest in creating stickers for WhatsApp. Below are a couple of updates you should know.

We’ve been working to improve the experience for stickers apps for Android. Until now, the communication between WhatsApp and sticker apps on Android relied on ContentProvider. However, there have been some challenges with ContentProvider not being accessible on certain devices (e.g. Samsung and Asus), particularly when the device is in battery saving mode. There have also been some issues with slow loading stickers. To resolve these issues, WhatsApp will now cache stickers when users add them to their sticker picker instead of fetching them from sticker apps each time the user opens sticker picker. This will speed up the loading process and alleviate the issues with ContentProvider. As such, WhatsApp needs to know when your app has new content to update the cache.

We have pushed an update to the Android version of the sample app. This update added "image_data_version" as a new field. You can notify changes of content by updating the "image_data_version" value, and WhatsApp will then re-cache your stickers. Please see https://github.com/WhatsApp/stickers/blob/master/Android/README.md#modifying-the-contentsjson-file for more details.

We’re constantly pushing updates to this repo to improve the experience. We encourage you to get the latest updates from our repo from time to time to ensure the best experience for your app. You can also subscribe notifications from our releases as we will push a new release when the changes is important enough.