What you need to know
- Android has announced a host of new updates coming for emoji.
- Through the Emoji 15.0 update, Android users can enjoy customizable emoji and animated ones, with a total of 31 new emoji joining the library.
- The new Emoji 15.0 update will be available for Android smartphones in December with the Android quarterly release.
Android has announced a host of new updates coming that will allow users to be more expressive when using emoji.
According to a Google Developers blog post, new emoji (colored and monochrome) and new ways to customize them will arrive soon. These updates include the new standard font called COLRv1, open-source animated emoji, and customization of your emoji through Emoji Kitchen.
Today, Unicode Consortium published the data files for the Unicode 15.0 update, which features 31 new emoji. These new additions bring Android's total emoji count to 3,664 and will arrive on Android starting this December with the upcoming Feature Drop before rolling out to more Google products by early 2023.
It will also come to AOSP (Android Open Source Project) in the coming weeks.
With the update, Google highlights the release of its first-ever batch of animated emoji. Google has a page where users can see some of these new animated emoji and download them. A few of these animated emoji are already supported on the Google Messages app.
Web users will also be able to customize an emoji's appearance using the COLRv1 format. This new color font allows users to alter the colors of an emoji and is available on Chrome and Edge, with Google expecting to bring further support to other browsers such as Firefox soon.
Through COLRv1 and Noto Color Emoji, users will be able to render crisp, vibrant digital imagery directly through their browser.
Google notes how users can customize the color of emoji with Emoji Kitchen, "thanks to Noto Emoji," which helps make them more personal. For instance, you can select a red rose and a yellow heart to create a yellow rose.
While the new emoji will be available later this year across products, Google's entire emoji library is already available to download and try out.
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