WhatsApp Plus animated stickers can escape the chat box and users are having way too much fun with it

WhatsApp is quietly testing a new tier of animated stickers that physically break out of the standard chat box. Some of these animations overlap the surrounding UI or even stretch across the entire screen.

The catch is you need the new WhatsApp Plus subscription to get your hands on them. We reported a few days ago that the paid Plus beta was slowly rolling out to select accounts. Now we know what at least one of those premium perks actually looks like.

A community deep dive on Reddit recently broke down exactly how these new animations work under the hood. Users poking around the desktop app files discovered WhatsApp is moving away from the old frame-based WEBP format for premium packs.

They use a completely new “.was” file extension instead. Inside those containers are Lottie-based JSON animations.

This means the new stickers are entirely vector-based. They can scale up without losing quality and clearly lack the strict boundary constraints enforced on standard WEBP stickers. That alone is notable because WhatsApp has historically kept chat interface elements extremely locked down.

But those massive, full-screen animations currently going viral? Those are not official WhatsApp features. That is the community already figuring out how to hijack the new rendering engine. Here’s one such video for reference:

Receiving a giant custom animation that covers your chat history looks like a glitch at first glance. But the sheer novelty has people incredibly excited, with multiple posts from users asking how to create their own versions of those full-screen animations using the file extension.

Here’s a video of the same shared on Reddit too:

One user figured out exactly how the prank works. Because the “.was” file runs compiled code, you do not even need to recompile the whole thing to change the animation. You just need a simple hexadecimal editor.

Modders are downloading the official sticker files and extracting the ZIP data attached to the main file. From there, they modify the secondary animation JSON file and inject their own custom images.

They then repackage the ZIP and append it right back to the end of the WebAssembly file. When the sticker loads in WhatsApp, the code executes and pulls the modified assets. That is how a standard premium sticker suddenly overlays a giant meme across your entire screen.

WhatsApp currently blocks unofficial custom uploads for this new format. If you try to add a hacked “.was” file normally, the app throws an error or refuses to display it.

But developers managed to bypass that block. They built custom scripts using the Baileys library to force third-party bots to send the hijacked files directly into chats. A GitHub repository is already circulating with the base code to help others replicate the workaround. That said, download and use these files at your own risk.

Only paying subscribers can officially download the base premium packs for now. But anyone on the receiving end will still see the hacked animations take over their screen when someone sends them.

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