It started in a family group chat. Someone posted a photo of my uncle asleep in a beach chair, mouth wide open, and that photo was begging to become a sticker. I grabbed my phone, downloaded the first sticker app that showed up in the store, and three minutes later I was watching my second thirty-second video for a slot-machine game so I could press "save".
When the sticker finally came out, it had a watermark. And a thick white outline around it that I never asked for and couldn't find a way to remove. I tried five or six more apps that same night. One wanted an account. Another wanted a subscription to "remove the background in high quality". Every single one had ads. Almost all of them pasted on the same white outline.
I was furious. This isn't a hard problem: cut a person out of a photo, make it the size WhatsApp accepts, send it. The phone already knows how to do all of that by itself. What was in the way wasn't the tech, it was the business model of these apps. They don't live off stickers, they live off people watching ads. The sticker is just the excuse to keep you standing there.
So I made my own.
The rules I gave myself
Before writing a single line of code, I wrote a list of things the app would not do. It turned out to be more useful than any feature list.
- Ads from other companies: none. If an app needs to interrupt you in order to exist, the app is wrong.
- No account. You open it, pick a photo, make the sticker. Nobody needs your email so you can cut out your uncle.
- The sticker is yours, exactly as you cut it. No outline glued on by default. If an outline ever becomes an option, it ships turned off.
- Your photo stays with you. The cutout runs on the phone itself, with what iPhone and Android already have built in. When a device can't handle it, there's a network path that processes and discards on the spot, without keeping anything. And people's photos never become training data, ads, or "segmentation".
- Everything you need to create is free. There's a store with packs of drawn characters, one-time purchases, prices in plain sight. It's there because it's there. If you never buy anything, the app stays whole.
I want to be clear about that last one, because it's where most of these apps go wrong. I didn't build this to make money. I built it because I want these apps gone, and complaining in the group chat wasn't working.
What was actually hard
Cutting the person out was the easy part. The system does almost all of it. The work was at the edges.
WhatsApp has clear rules: a sticker is 512 by 512, at most 100 KB each, and a pack holds between 3 and 30. If anything falls outside that, the whole pack is rejected, and it's the app's job to explain why. So a big part of Figurô is making sure you never see that rejection. When something goes over the limit, it tells you which sticker it was and fixes it in one tap.
Another thing I refused to accept: losing work. You're in the middle of a sticker, a call comes in, the system closes the app, and when you come back there's nothing. In Figurô the draft saves itself and comes back exactly as it was. I tested it by killing the app mid-save, on purpose, over and over. It came back every time.
On iPhone there's a detail I really like: every sticker you save shows up on its own inside Messages, in the sticker drawer, with nothing to export. You make it in Figurô and it's already there.
And since there's no cloud and no account, I needed an honest answer to "I got a new phone, now what?". The answer is a file. Each pack becomes a .figuro file you keep wherever you want and open on the new device. You can also import packs from other apps: bring what you already had, then delete the old app in peace.
For those who want the technical part
Flutter, with native pieces in Swift and Kotlin where the system demands it: the cutout, the handoff to WhatsApp, and the Messages drawer. Runs on iPhone (iOS 17 and up) and Android (7 and up). It shipped in five languages, because stickers aren't just a Brazilian thing. Although here they're practically a sport.
Where it stands
The app is called Figurô and has been in both stores since early August. In a month, a little over a thousand people installed it, almost all of them in Brazil. It's small. But the reviews that came in say what I wanted to hear: "no ads, simple, easy". That was the point.
Right now I'm working on animated stickers. Short video turning into a sticker that moves, within WhatsApp's limits and a few more I found along the way.
If you make stickers, tell me in the comments what annoys you about the apps you use. That's how this one started.
