Google announces new, animated emoji for Android


Google is adding more emojis to the Android platform. It is using the Unicode 15 standard, which has 21 new emoji. Based on the Unicode 15 update, the new Android emojis are more expressive, and some of them are even animated.

Today, Google is going one step further by adding new emoji characters in colour and in black and white, metadata like short codes, a new font standard called COLRv1, open source animated emotes, as well as customization features in the emoji kitchen. Now, it’s easier than ever to speak quickly online. The firm recently updated Google Nearby Share, Google Meet, and Gboard with new features.

New Emoji!

To start with, the Unicode Consortium published all the data files related to the Unicode 15.0 release earlier today, which included 31 new emoji characters. A wing, a hand pointing both left and right, and a face in motion are among the objects in the collection. Now that emojis exist, you can tremble in your boots, make pigs fly, and give high-fives.

With these new additions, there are now 3,664 emoji available, and all of them will be made available across all Google products in the first quarter of 2019. However, given that Google is also adding new animated emojis to the Android emoji library, these might not even be the most interesting developments. You might already have access to 200 of these within Google Messages.

Dancing Emotes

While emoji are nearly unrecognizable from the late 1990s, this introduces KDDI’s first dancer emoji. Like language, emoji evolve. First animations! Scan, download, and watch them dance. You may have seen some in Messages by Google, which supports them now. The artwork is licensed under CC BY 4.0.

New Color Font Support

Emoji innovation is no longer limited to mobile; digital environments have much to offer. Thanks to COLRv1, colour fonts like Noto Color emoji may render as crisply as digital images. Color typefaces can also be customized. If using Chrome. Try it!

COLRv1 doesn’t support the 1920s duck emoji. It showcases the new typeface standard’s potential. Interoperability isn’t an issue because your ducks render in the browser. Stretch our imaginations with our colorful illustrations of emojis. Being Emoji-adjacent is exciting. You may adjust the hue of goth emoji with Gboard’s Emoji Kitchen stickers. Chrome and Edge support COLRv1. Firefox will soon have it.

Customized Emotes

Emoji Kitchen lets you adjust their hue. No shade: I love that “pink heart” was named the “most anticipated emoji” on social networking sites earlier this summer, but what if changing the colour of an emote was as simple as pressing a button and didn’t necessitate the Unicode Consortium conducting a cross-linguistic study of colour terms to add three new coloured hearts? Noto Emoji makes customising emotes easier. Emoji Kitchen on Gboard may modify the colour of a heart by combining emojis.

Availability

The updated Unicode 15 emojis are expected to be added to AOSP “in the next weeks” and will be available for Android in December, according to Google’s plans. Google Pixel smartphones are most likely to receive this update initially.

Commenting on the launch, Jennifer Daniel, Emoji and Expression Creative Director, Google, said,

While technically these are stickers, it’s a lovely example of how emoji are rapidly evolving. Whether you’re a developer, designer, or just a citizen of the Internet, Noto Emoji has something for everyone and we love seeing what you make with it.