New exclusive Emoji for Pixel and Android Q

In 1999, the first original emojis were released, and they were 176, now we are talking about a number that goes over 3000 and will always be destined to increase. Google has embarked on a new project in this area, introducing new 53 characters that will be present initially only on Pixel smartphones and then to all devices compatible with Android Q.

The new emojis are neither masculine nor feminine, they are Google’s attempt to simplify the emoji keyboard with more universal characters. The current approach with these characters is not intuitive, and you risk getting lost in looking for one, having the possibility to choose skin tones and gender.

Another problem is that emoji drawings sometimes have different genres between different platforms, not generalizing the Unicode character: Google’s design for the person in the sauna is female, but on iOS the character is male. This means that emoji can change when it is sent from one device to another. 

Google’s new approach, initially tested on Android Pie, is to create designs that could be both male and female, representing the character with generic signs: some have medium-length hair and are genderless, while in Dracula’s emoji the bow tie, and the choker have been eliminated in favor of a chain.

This kind of communication is not easy to implement, the Google designer, Jennifer Daniel, said: ” We cannot avoid race, gender, any other number of things in culture and in the class […]; what we are trying to do is to find the signifiers that suggest that emoji can be both masculine and feminine, or neither masculine nor feminine. ”

For now, the 53 new emojis are exclusively a Google project, which means that if you send them to a non-Google smartphone they will still be assigned a genre that will not correspond with the meaning these new designs want to convey, probably the compatibility will come with the update to Android Q.