If you've ever tried to save a TikTok sticker and noticed the file ends in .awebp, you're looking at animated WebP. It's a format Google developed as a modern replacement for GIF and PNG. TikTok uses it because it's genuinely better in almost every technical way.
What makes WebP better than GIF
The same animation saved as WebP can be 3 to 5 times smaller than the GIF version. It supports more colors, handles transparency cleanly, and compresses video-like content far more efficiently. For a platform serving billions of sticker impressions a day, that difference in file size adds up to a huge amount of bandwidth saved.
So why doesn't everyone just use WebP
The problem is support. GIF is from 1987 and works everywhere, email clients, Discord, iMessage, Reddit, older apps, messaging platforms built years ago. WebP is newer and while all modern browsers support it, most third party apps and platforms don't. If you want to send a TikTok sticker on WhatsApp, iMessage, or upload it to Tenor, WebP simply won't work.
That's why conversion still matters
Converting to GIF trades file size for compatibility. Your sticker gets bigger but it works anywhere. A 200KB TikTok sticker might become a 1.5MB GIF. That's the cost of universal support. For most uses, sending in a chat, using as a reaction, uploading to a GIF platform, the tradeoff is worth it.
What about MP4
MP4 is even more efficient than WebP for video content but it doesn't support transparency and doesn't autoplay silently everywhere the way GIF does. For short looping animations with no background, GIF remains the most compatible format available.