The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly affected industries around the world, with various forms of lockdown measures in place in countries that are severely affected by the pandemic. Now, a new announcement by the organisation that’s responsible for the innovative emoji characters that many use on mobile devices has confirmed that there will be a 6-month delay for Emoji 14.0 due to the coronavirus.
According to an official blog post, the company explained that volunteers play a big part in the release of new emoji, which is why the consortium has delayed the release of version 14.0 by 6 months till September 2021. This means that we’re probably only going to see emoji version 14.0 on Android and iOS devices in 2022, as opposed to 2021.
According to Mark Davis, President of the Consortium:
“Under the current circumstances we’ve heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment and decided it was in the best interests of our volunteers and the organisations that depend on the standard to push out our release date.”
However, we’ll still be seeing fresh characters on mobile devices in 2020. Emoji 13.0 has already confirmed, with 117 new characters available for use soon. However, this is also dependent on when smartphone OS updates are pushed out—emoji updates are usually included with major OTA updates. According to Jeremy Burge of Emojipedia, these will probably be available in September–October on Android and iOS devices.
The new emoji will include trendy topics such as Bubble Tea, while there are also more progressive, gender-neutral emojis. There will even be a transgender flag emoji, and an “Italian Hand Gesture”—if you’re a fan of Serie A football from Italy, you’ll certainly enjoy the last one.
For more information, click here to read Unicode Consortium’s full blog post.
