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Pixel Studio's AI-generated stickers are coming to your keyboard (APK teardown)
- Pixel Studio currently lets you generate stickers, but what are you supposed to do with them?
- Gboard shows evidence of preparing to add support for a Pixel Studio sticker pack.
- This solution feels like it’s intended to replace the scrapped “Emogen” system.
Your new Pixel 9 is a powerful, capable smartphone — that just also happens to also be great at generating images of animals wearing clothing. Pixel Studio is a fun, AI-powered tool that lets you tap into your creative side, without requiring a lot of annoying “skills” or “experience” before you’re able to create some very impressive imagery. Today we’re checking one new way that Google could soon start let you use all the pictures you make with it.
An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
Pixel Studio lets you create art in lots of different styles, including stickers. When you think about it, the only real difference between a sticker and any other image on your phone is what an app lets you do with it, and right now we’re looking at what Gboard wants to start doing with Pixel Studio stickers.
In version 14.8.02.686567880-beta-arm64-v8a beta of the Gboard app, we find the presence of some new text strings that explicitly refer to Pixel Studio stickers:
<string name="0_resource_name_obfuscated_7f140611">Sticker from Pixel Studio</string>
<string name="0_resource_name_obfuscated_7f140612">Made by me</string>
<string name="0_resource_name_obfuscated_7f140613">Pixel Studio</string>Now, we haven’t been able to get any of this working just yet, but we feel like it’s already pretty easy to see where this is headed. Internally, the app refers to these Pixel Studio creations as the “MythWeaver” sticker pack, and it looks like we’ll eventually see them featured alongside the rest of your sticker packs in Gboard — though it’s possible they could always get their own special section.
All that sounds reasonably straightforward, and right now we’re just waiting for Google to connect the rest of the dots here and make this actually happen. Considering that Pixel Studio is limited to Pixel 9 series devices (at least for now), this might not be the Gboard team’s highest priority at the moment, but we’d still expect it to be landing reasonably soon.
If you’re a particularly astute Gboard fan, you may be drawing comparisons to the “Emogen” generative AI sticker system we heard the app was working on back in the summer of 2023. Apple beat Google to the punch and actually implemented something like this with its new Genmoji tools. Google’s project, meanwhile, never saw the public light of day, and recent Gboard updates have essentially wiped away all traces of it. But functionally, it’s easy to see this new combination of Pixel Studio + Gboard as filling that very same role.