After promising some new Android emoji back in October, Google’s Hiroshi Lockheimer has revealed that the updated characters will be arriving next week.
Lockheimer today Tweeted that new emoji are coming to Nexus devices starting next week. Included will be a new keyboard, new font, and new code, so Google will be pushing out a new system image to devices. These changes will be shared with Android OEMs so that they can push the updates to their own devices, too.
Android’s emoji has caught some flak for being kind of strange looking, especially lately with the new emoji iOS users got with the iOS 9.1 update. Google has finally responded to the criticism of its emoji, though, which is exciting news for Android folk. While emoji are nothing new, they’ve recently become more popular with Americans, making the characters are now a more important part of mobile. And soon, Android users will have a new set of emoji to communicate with.