One keyword split into five packages: a WhatsApp "romantic stickers" shell app, 920k installs in a week

An indie developer called Exdev Apps listed a couple-sticker pack for WhatsApp on Google Play in Jul 14. By Nov 6 it had 8.52M cumulative installs, and in the last 7 days it added 919k. It has no new feature; the category has existed on Play for seven years. What it runs on is a cheap distribution play: package name, title and update notes are all written as search terms, five packs go up for one keyword at once, and they're parked on communication free charts in 28 countries. Below: how the play works, where the money comes from, who's competing, and whether you should follow it.

The two pinned reviews

Open its store page in the India store and the top two reviews tell you the whole story.

One is a five-star from Oct 11, by Halena: "Love this app so much! ❤️😍 Romantic stickers are so cute, so beautiful, full of love… perfect for couples, highly recommended! 💖😘🌹" 4,542 people marked it helpful. The other is a one-star from Sep 17, by Jeet Deepak Dholakia: "The worst experience ever. Every tap is a long ad." 3,171 people marked it helpful. A third is shorter: "Fake, annoying app, don't download, the ads will drain your traffic." (Google Play India, 11-06)

The five-star review reads like it was written by the same person as the store description, so it's probably a solicited review. That's an inference. The one-star reviews are the real signal: it makes money from ads, and the ads are dense. On the India store page it sits at 3.3 stars. Over a bit more than a week, 1-star reviews went from 1,918 to 2,334 (+22%), while 5-star reviews only went from 8,206 to 8,594 (+5%) (public Google Play data, 10-29 to 11-06). The more users it gets, the lower the score goes.

None of this stops it from getting hundreds of thousands of installs a day.

What it is

Open it and you get a row of sticker packs: kiss, hug, heart, good-morning love, good night, sorry, miss you, Valentine's, anniversary. Tap "Add to WhatsApp" and it's in your chat. The store description says it plainly: for boyfriends, girlfriends, married couples, long-distance relationships, good morning and good night.

Technically it's the shell you get from WhatsApp's official sample project, which became available 2018 years ago when third-party sticker packs opened up: one template, a pile of images, one "Add" button. Version 1.0.6, no updates since Oct 1, and it still pulls in hundreds of thousands of installs a day. The store listing says no in-app purchases; all revenue is ads.

Where the traffic comes from: it ranks first for the search

On Nov 6, searching "romantic stickers" in the India Google Play store returns it as the top result. The second is an app from Ather Apps with an identical name, also called "Romantic Stickers WAStickers".

It ranks first because every field that can hold text carries the search term:

• The package name is the keyword: romanticstickers.love.sticker.wastickerapps;
• The title takes the two highest-frequency terms, "Romantic Stickers" and "WAStickers";
• The description is a long list of variations: love stickers, couple stickers, kiss stickers, hug stickers, Good Morning love stickers…;
• The "What's new" field has no real update notes, just 19 lines of keywords: "Love Romantic Kiss WAStickers / Romantic Love Stickers WA / Love Kiss Stickers for WhatsApp / Romantic WhatsApp Stickers / Love Hug Stickers WASticker…"

Where do the searchers come from? The countries where it charts tell you. 11-06 It sits on the communication free charts in 28 regions at once: #15 in India, 21 in South Africa, 22 in Turkey, 24 in the UAE, 25 in Saudi Arabia, 25 in Brazil, 27 in Mexico, 29 in Indonesia, 29 in Nigeria, 30 in Argentina, all the way to #51 in Poland (Google Play charts, 11-06). Every one of these is a place where WhatsApp is the default chat app and Android dominates. Couples there send "good morning, I love you" stickers daily, so the term gets searched year-round. Future-Apps, the original "Romantic Stickers WASticker.ly" listed in 2023, has 32.6M installs and still added 7k in the last 297 days, which proves the demand.

Charting on the communication free chart isn't hard. On the India chart it sits next to Discord, Edge and Opera. Once it's on the chart, it gets more chart exposure and more "similar apps" recommendations.

Whether it's buying Google or Meta ads, you can't tell from outside. Running tens of thousands of installs a day and holding steady rankings across twenty-plus countries makes Google app ads likely (inference). Nobody is pushing it on TikTok. Search "romantic stickers whatsapp" and the top results are Sticker.ly share-code videos, like the Portuguese account @regi_sccp's October video last year, "copy the code 9WJUJL and paste it into sticker.ly to get the best love stickers," with 800k views (TikTok search, 11-06).

Who's behind it: one keyword, five packs

Exdev Apps has 5 apps on Play, all permutations of the same few words, and 4 of them are fighting over "romantic":

Public Google Play data, 11-06. Together the five have 18.6M installs, +1.81M in a week.

The developer site is hosted on blogspot, the contact email is gmail, and the privacy policy is on Google Sites: the typical setup of a solo developer or a small workshop. The method is simple too: every extra package name adds another slot in search results, and so another chance to chart. Whichever pack takes off, they push it further. The February pack got traction first; the July one caught up.

Where the money comes from

Only ads. The "long ad every tap" in the one-star review describes interstitials plus rewarded video, the standard setup for sticker apps.

No public revenue figure. Rough math: hundreds of thousands of new installs a day, a few interstitials per user, and interstitial CPMs in India, Indonesia and Nigeria of a few cents to about a dollar. That puts the pack at a few hundred dollars a day (estimate, could be off by several times). Not much, but the cost is close to zero: one template, a batch of images, and a version nobody has touched since Oct 1. So it doesn't need to be good, just plentiful.

Who's competing for the same term

That's the biggest problem with this play. The "romantic sticker" keyword is already crowded, and most of the entrants arrived this year:

Beyond that, there's WhatsApp's built-in sticker store, AI-generated stickers, the stickers in Gboard and GIPHY, and user-made routes like Sticker Maker (200M installs).

Exdev's skill is that it was the first in this 2026 wave to reach eight million-plus. But if you walk in today, you're the tenth or fifteenth pack on this keyword.

If it were you

The verdict: Don't copy this one. The play is real, cheap and profitable, but "romantic stickers" has drawn a dozen-plus same-name packs in two months. You'd only get scraps. What's worth learning is the method: one high-demand keyword, many packs, keywords packed into every field, and a low-barrier category chart. Not this app.

Who it suits: A team of 1–2 people or a small studio with experience making Play utility apps, solid ASO skills, and a template and asset pipeline, that can live with low per-user revenue and win on volume.

Who it doesn't suit: Anyone who wants to build a product with reputation that keeps users long-term; anyone unwilling to skirt Google Play's spam policy; anyone hoping to make big money from a single pack. It's only a few hundred dollars a day.

How to do it: Don't fight over "romantic", which is saturated. Find adjacent keywords in the same need that nobody has covered: by holiday (Eid, Diwali, Christmas, Mother's Day by country), by language (Hindi love messages, Arabic good-morning stickers, Portuguese figurinhas, Swahili), by relationship (for mom, for husband, for best friend). First search Play to see what ranks. If the top results are packs that haven't been updated in over a year, have low ratings, but still decent installs, someone is searching and nobody has served them well. Use one template per keyword, and write the package name, title, description and update notes around that keyword. Do one thing better than this app: keep ads from appearing after every tap, and show usable stickers on the first screen. Reviews in this category are almost all about ads, and only a decent rating can hold up your search ranking.

How to get users: Build on Play search and amplify through the communication free charts. For a second channel, learn from Sticker.ly: find TikTok accounts in Brazil, Mexico and Paraguay that post "sticker share codes" (hundreds of thousands of views each), since their audience is exactly the people who want to add stickers to WhatsApp.

When to get in early: Holiday keywords have hard deadlines. For Valentine's, list before mid-January so the pack can build some installs and ratings. Eid and Christmas work the same way, about a month ahead. The category itself isn't time-sensitive; the demand has been there for seven years.

Signs you've misread it: ① If Exdev's or Stickorax's sister packs get taken down in bulk by Google within 30 days, the multi-pack play is riskier than it looks, and it may not be worth doing at all, since you'd need to spread packs across different developer accounts. ② If the new keyword you picked still has under a few hundred daily installs two weeks after listing, that keyword has little volume or is already dominated by older packs. Switch keywords. ③ If this pack's daily installs fall to a few thousand after paid promotion stops, its traffic was mostly bought, not searched, and the organic search route is harder than this article makes it sound.

Data and sources

• Install counts, daily new installs, rating counts, star distribution, and rankings on the communication free charts in 28 regions: public Google Play data, 2026-10-29 to 11-06.
• Store description, "What's new", reviews, and developer app list: this app and the Exdev Apps developer page on play.google.com (English India pages, read 11-06); India search results for "romantic stickers" (11-06).
• Competitor install counts: public Google Play data, 11-06.
• TikTok view counts: TikTok search for "romantic stickers whatsapp", 11-06.
• Where you see "inference" or "estimate", the figures are inferred or estimated. There is no direct evidence of paid acquisition or actual ad revenue.