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Do you use Apple products? Do you like emoji? Do you want more emoji? If you answered yes to those questions, then good news: Apple announced today that it’ll be adding new emoji to its iOS, macOS, and watchOS platforms later this year. It showed off a few of the new characters in celebration of “World Emoji Day,” which I adamantly refuse to acknowledge as a real thing.
The new emoji appear to be Apple’s take on the most recent Unicode 10 standard, which, among other things, added 56 new emoji to the lexicon. Those emoji include soon-to-be classics like the “Exploding Head,” “Crazy Face,” “Face With Monocle,” and “Sandwich” emoji, along with an oddly long list of fantasy-themed emoji. (Was anyone really asking for Mage, Fairy, Vampire, Merperson, Elf, Genie, and Zombie emoji?)
😀🌎🌍🌏📆 Happy #WorldEmojiDay! 🎉 We’ve got some 😎 new ones to show you, coming later this year! 👀👇 https://t.co/xBR9ZJ7l4g pic.twitter.com/fhDrr4J5KG
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) July 17, 2017
If any of this sounds familiar, that’s because Unicode 10 was officially released by the Unicode Consortium earlier this year on June 20th. But Unicode just decides what the new emoji and text characters are. It’s then up to manufacturers to create and release designs for the emoji (like Google’s blobs) on their own, which usually takes a few months after the standard is announced. That largely depends on the company, however: the Android O beta, for example, already has the new emoji available to use.
Apple hasn’t said when the new emoji will be released, but it seems likely that they’ll be packaged into the iOS 11 and macOS High Sierra updates scheduled for this fall.
Source: The Verge