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Thursday, 1 June 2017

Twitter Adds 69 New Emoji - But There’s a Catch

Twitter has added 69 new unique emoji including the much anticipated flags for Wales, England and Scotland. The line-up of Emoji 5.0 revealed emoticons such as a star-struck emoji, woman with headscarf, a swearing emoji, dinosaurs, face with raised eyebrow and a whole range of diverse skin tones. Until now, Twitter kept a rather meagre and simple set of emoticons unlike other platforms that have a lot of emoji which are not used that often. In this update, there are 239 new emoji and 69 unique new emoticons a user can choose from while expressing themselves on Twitter. Twitter is the first to provide support for Emoji 5.0. There is, however, a catch.

The Catch

Most of the new emoji depend on characters that are included in Unicode 10.0, as reported by Emojipedia. This means that as of now these new emoji won’t work on iOS, MacOS, Windows and Android devices. All the new icons will not be viewable on platforms other than the official Twitter website and app and for the time being, it will be made available when using Twitter on desktop. Like, for example, one of the new emoji, the flag, will automatically be shown as a black flag on some platforms such as third-party apps and clients that do not support the new emoji yet. So in case you have posted something with the new features, on any app that doesn’t support Emoji 5.0, you now know why it doesn’t show up like it is supposed to. This, however, is expected to be a short term problem and a solution for this is being worked upon.

The Solution

The new Twitter emoji are all set to be included in other platforms before this year ends. Also, an update for Tweetdeck can be expected very soon. In the upcoming iOS 11 software update, Apple will most likely include the support required for the new emoji released. Apple is expected to make this announcement at its forthcoming Worldwide Developers Conference. At the same time, Google has also made an announcement about its plans to introduce support for the new emoji in the Android O release which is expected soon. Users who can access the Android O developer preview will be able to view the emoji already.

The other newly introduced emoji include an orange heart, a face vomiting emoji, an exploding head, a hedgehog, a t-rex, a breastfeeding woman, a flying saucer and a brain. Few food based icons have also been included such as a pretzel, a fortune cookie, a pie and broccoli.

The Unicode Consortium is an organisation which is mainly responsible to make sure that the icons or emoji are all the same on different platforms. They make the final decision about which new emoji should be released. Unicode had released an entire list of the 51 newly developed emoji set to be introduced in the Unicode 10 release. Also, a preview of the new line up for the current year was released by Emojipedia earlier this year which included a complete list of the to-be introduced emoji.

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