Google's fun AR Stickers now take up less space

Google’s augmented reality (AR) stickers are a fun, neat trick of the camera app on its Pixel smartphones. You can drop animated characters — sometimes promotional ones like Star Wars stormtroopers or the Stranger Things crew — into the frame your camera is capturing and they look almost convincingly real.

Google has also released other add-on AR sticker packs including some “foodmoji” characters (a burger, donut, coffee cup, etc) and the ability to have 3D text float in AR space. But now the company has removed those two packs from the main AR Stickers app and given them separate Play Store listings, allowing Pixel owners to save a little bit of space on their phones if they have zero interest.

And I do mean a little bit. As Android Police points out, the foodmoji pack is 24.66MB and the text pack comes in at a little under 5MB, so you’re not saving all that much storage, but it’s something. Remember that it’s Google’s ARCore tech doing most of the work here, and the main AR Stickers software is still required; you can’t just download these add-ons and use them standalone. That means these AR Stickers are still very much Pixel-only. But ARCore is gradually rolling out to more and more Android phones to improve and optimize the augmented reality experience for the whole platform.