Virtual stickers are all the rage on social networks and in messaging apps. Just two weeks ago, Apple jumped on the sticker bandwagon at WWDC with the upcoming version of the Messages app that will ship with iOS 10. This is not something particularly new (remember Gowalla?), but the pace of adoption seems to have accelerated in the past year with the growing popularity of apps like Snapchat and Facebook Messenger.
Now Twitter is going all-in with hundreds of custom stickers and rotating seasonal sticker packs you can use to decorate photos. As reported by the The Verge this morning, Twitter will be rolling out stickers to all users in its official app over the next few weeks.
Twitter has its own special take on stickers. From within the official Twitter client, you will be able to
search them like hashtags. Tap on a sticker inside a tweet and you’ll be taken to a new timeline that shows you how it’s being used around the world.
It appears that stickers will be available through Twitter’s official client only, which undoubtedly will be viewed by some people as yet another advantage of third-party Twitter clients, but I can’t help but wonder if sticker-mania will have a net negative impact on third-party clients like Tweetbot and Twitterrific.