Quick answer
Animated WhatsApp stickers are animated WebP files, 512 × 512 pixels, up to 500 KB, running 10 seconds or less with frames of at least 8 ms. They loop while the recipient previews them and stop on the first frame afterwards, so the first frame should be a complete image rather than a blank opening.
What an animated sticker actually is
An animated sticker is a single animated WebP file — not a GIF, not a video. It carries its own frames and timing internally, the same way an animated GIF does, but with an alpha channel and much better compression. WhatsApp plays it inline in the chat rather than opening a player.
| Requirement | Static stickers | Animated stickers |
|---|---|---|
| Dimensions | 512 × 512 px | 512 × 512 px |
| File format | WebP | Animated WebP |
| Max file size per sticker | 100 KB | 500 KB |
| Animation length | — | 10 seconds or less |
| Minimum frame duration | — | 8 ms |
| Tray icon | 96 × 96 px, max 50 KB | 96 × 96 px, max 50 KB (static) |
| Stickers per pack | 3 minimum, 30 maximum | 3 minimum, 30 maximum |
| Mixing types | A pack is all static or all animated — never both | Same |
The first frame is what people usually see
WhatsApp loops an animated sticker while it is being previewed and then settles on the first frame. That makes the first frame the sticker's resting state, and the version that sits in the chat history afterwards. A first frame that is blank, or shows only the start of a motion, leaves a sticker that looks broken once the animation stops.
Design the first frame as the complete image, then animate outward from it. This is the single most common mistake in home-made animated packs.
Staying under 500 KB
500 KB is a hard ceiling and it binds long before the 10-second duration limit does. A busy full-canvas animation can exceed it in under two seconds, while a small looping element can run for the full ten and stay comfortably small. File size is driven by how much of the canvas changes between frames, not by how long the animation lasts.
- Animate a part of the canvas rather than the whole of it — a waving hand costs far less than a moving background.
- Reduce the frame rate before reducing the frame count; 12–15 fps reads as smooth for illustration.
- Keep the palette small. Flat colour compresses; gradients and noise do not.
- Avoid large regions of partial transparency, which are expensive to encode.
Why an animated sticker sometimes does not move
A sticker that appears as a still image is nearly always a playback problem rather than a broken file. The usual causes, in order of likelihood:
- The recipient's WhatsApp is out of date. Animated sticker support arrived in a specific release; older builds render only the first frame.
- The device is old enough that animated sticker playback is unsupported, in which case the still first frame is the intended fallback.
- A data-saver or battery-saver mode is suppressing autoplay.
- The file was exported as a static WebP — a genuine authoring error, and the only case where the pack itself is at fault.
Because the fallback is a still first frame rather than an error, a well-designed first frame means the sticker still communicates on devices that cannot animate it.
Animated and static packs are always separate
WhatsApp does not allow a pack to contain both animated and static stickers. Publishers who want both have to ship two packs, which is why catalogues label whole packs as animated rather than tagging individual stickers.
