Michal Ždanský Apple has said in recent months that it would like to bring support for racial diversity to the Emoji character set, and it intends to follow through on that statement. The Unicode Consortium, which manages the Emoji standard, came out this week with by design, how diversity support should work for these emoticons. The design is now being modified by Apple and Google engineers and they plan to include it in the next major update to the Emoji standard, which is due in the middle of next year.
The proposal itself came from two engineers, one from Apple and the other from Google, who is also the president of the consortium. The entire diversity system is supposed to work based on combining Emoji characters with skin samples. There will be a total of five of them, from white to black skin tone. When you place a pattern behind an Emoji that shows a face or other part of the human body, such as a hand, the resulting emoji will change color according to the pattern. However, the patterns will not be able to be combined with other Emoji, an unsupported combination will display the Emoji and the pattern side by side.
Apple and Google are the only companies actively involved in the development of the standard, but the result is likely to be reflected beyond the operating systems that both companies develop, from browsers to other platforms. It is not clear how long after the update of the standard, the new Emoji will reach iOS and OS X. For example, the new Emoji introduced several months before the release of iOS 8 did not even make it to version 8.1. It wouldn't be surprising if we didn't see racially diverse Emoji until the tenth version of iOS and OS X 10.12.
Their worries on my head…
on emoji head?
A smiley is not a person. And that's why it should only be deep yellow. This causes problems…
I like it. Apple is a really accommodating company in this. Skin color is not a disease, unlike homosexuality, which was included there by the who. I hope that Tim will get over it, because it is said that they also fired Forstal, which was a great shame.
They could also offer black and brown paper in copiers because white people are very racist... why on earth does anyone care about the skin color of smiley faces? It seems to me that it is being exaggerated...
If it's about equality, I would suggest adding a smiley homosexual :-)
and also mouths in burkas
And some suicide bomber smiley :-P
Which one is a gypsy smiley?