The Unicode Consortium went official with 157 new emoji in its Unicode 11.0 standard last month. Within the new set are things like bagels, cupcakes, salt, test tubes and a whole bunch of other little goodies.
However, Apple has announced today that it will only carry through with 70 new emoji — at least for its initial launch of iOS 12 and macOS Mojave.
Most of the early bunch will include trait modifiers for personas such as ginger hair, curly hair and baldness. It will also feature a couple of new faces and personas like a woozy face or a superhero. The remaining emoji will presumably come in updates later this year include ones for a parrot, lobster, peacock, mango, moon cake and others.
It should be appreciated that it’s World Emoji Day today, which may or may not have a meaning to you in and of itself, but it’s a fact that emoji have complexified the way we communicate with each other and that it takes time, effort and discernment to draw emoji that fit a certain design standard such as Apple’s.
Presumably, Google is also working on updating its emoji set in time for Android P. In a post on its The Keyword blog, the company interviewed its head of emoji design, Jennifer Daniel, who announced that Android’s (in)famous blob emoji will be making a return in a form of a sticker pack in the near future.
