The spread of the coronavirus has impacted a lot of companies and their products, causing delays for movies and video games and pushing some films to move to streaming much quicker than they normally would. Now it's affecting emoji, too.
The Unicode Consortium has announced that it's postponing the release of Unicode 14.0 by 6 months. That means it's moving from March 2020 to September 2021. "This delay will also impact related specifications and data, such as new emoji characters," the group says.
As noted by Emojipedia's Jeremy Burge, this means that whatever new emojis emerge from the Emoji 14.0 release, they'll come to major platforms later than usual. Normally those new emoji would be released in 2021, but this delay means that they probably won't come to platforms like Android and iOS until 2022.
The good news here is that the 117 new emojis coming as part of the Emoji 13.0 (shown above) are not affected by this delay. New emojis are typically included with major Android and iOS updates released in the fall, and the characters that are part of the Emoji 13.0 release should still be arriving later this year.
Some of the new characters included in Emoji 13.0 are a ninja, pinched fingers, bubble tea, people hugging, a smiling face with a tear, and a pickup truck.
New emojis are a big deal for a lot of people and when they're included with an Android or iOS update, that can be a big reason for people to install it. While some folks may not be aware of these regular emoji releases and the delay of Emoji 14.0, today's news is still notable because we won't see new emoji in new Android and iOS updates next year like we typically do.
