How to Delete Stickers on iPhone: A Complete Guide

Stickers on iPhone have become surprisingly layered — they show up in Messages, live inside the Photos app as part of your library, and get stored in dedicated packs you've downloaded from the App Store. Knowing where a sticker lives determines how you delete it, and the process differs more than most people expect.

What Counts as a "Sticker" on iPhone?

Before diving into deletion methods, it helps to understand the different types of stickers iOS manages:

• iMessage sticker packs — downloaded apps from the App Store that appear in the Messages drawer
• Custom stickers created from photos — a feature introduced in iOS 17 that lets you lift subjects from images and save them as stickers
• Memoji stickers — generated automatically from your Memoji and stored in the sticker drawer
• Emoji stickers — added in iOS 17, these are large-format emoji treated as stickers in Messages

Each category has its own removal path. There's no single "delete all stickers" button anywhere in iOS.

How to Delete Downloaded Sticker Pack Apps

Sticker packs from the App Store are installed as apps, even if they appear as lightweight extensions inside Messages. To remove them:

1. Long-press the sticker pack app icon on your Home Screen or in the App Library
2. Tap Remove App
3. Confirm by selecting Delete App

Alternatively, go to Settings → General → iPhone Storage, scroll to find the sticker app, tap it, and select Delete App. This method is useful if the sticker pack doesn't have a visible icon on your Home Screen.

Once deleted, the sticker pack disappears from the Messages app drawer immediately.

How to Delete Custom Photo Stickers (iOS 17 and Later)

iOS 17 introduced the ability to create stickers directly from photos by lifting a subject from its background. These stickers are stored inside the Photos app under a dedicated Stickers section.

To delete them:

1. Open the Photos app
2. Tap Collections or scroll to find the Stickers section (it appears under Utilities in older navigation layouts, or within the new sidebar in iOS 18)
3. Tap and hold a sticker
4. Select Delete Sticker

You can also delete multiple stickers at once by tapping Select in the top corner, choosing the stickers you want to remove, then tapping the trash icon.

🗂️ Note: Deleting a custom sticker does not delete the original photo it was created from. The source image stays in your library.

How to Manage Memoji Stickers

Memoji stickers are automatically generated based on your Memoji characters. You can't delete individual Memoji sticker poses — they're generated dynamically. However, you can delete an entire Memoji to remove the associated stickers:

1. Open Messages and tap the compose button (or open any conversation)
2. Tap the Sticker/Apps button (the plus icon or smiley face, depending on your iOS version)
3. Select the Memoji panel
4. Swipe left on a Memoji character
5. Tap Delete

This removes that Memoji and all the sticker variations it generates. Your default "look-alike" Memoji can be edited but not deleted entirely.

How to Remove Stickers Already Sent in a Conversation

If you've sent a sticker in a Messages conversation and want to remove it from the chat:

1. Long-press the sticker in the conversation
2. Tap Undo Send (available on iOS 16 and later, within a 2-minute window)

After that window closes, the sticker remains visible to both parties. There's no retroactive deletion beyond the undo window.

For stickers that have been reacted to messages (applied as a tapback-style overlay), long-press the sticker reaction on the message bubble and tap the X or Remove option to take it back.

Variables That Affect the Process

The exact steps above can look different depending on several factors:

What Happens to Stickers in Shared Albums and iCloud

If you've synced stickers across devices via iCloud Photos, deleting a custom photo sticker on one device removes it from the Stickers collection across all devices signed into the same Apple ID — as long as iCloud Photos is enabled. The deletion syncs in the background, though it may take a few minutes.

This also means that if someone else in a Family Sharing setup has their own Apple ID, their sticker collections are managed separately. Stickers aren't shared across Apple IDs.

The Sticker Drawer Doesn't Auto-Clean Itself 🧹

One thing many users don't realize: the Messages sticker drawer accumulates stickers passively. Even stickers received from others can sometimes pin to the "Frequently Used" row at the top of the drawer. To remove a sticker from that row, long-press it and look for a Remove from Recents or Remove from Favorites option, depending on your iOS version.

The degree to which this matters depends on how heavily you use Messages, how many sticker packs you've accumulated over years of app downloads, and whether you share a device or Apple ID setup with family members. Someone with a single Memoji and no downloaded packs has a completely different management picture than someone who's been collecting sticker apps since iOS 10.

What your specific setup looks like — and which of these methods applies most directly — comes down to which stickers you're seeing, where they're stored, and which iOS version is running on your device.