Absolutely, emojis shouldn't have a race, gender or sexual orientation. They should be round and yellow. When they're yellow genderless blobs, they're universal, they transcend categorization. They're abstract representations of an emotion. This racially diverse politically correct human emoji movement is just ridiculous and can be more racist than not. [1]

EDIT: What's more, if you go this route and truly want to embrace diversity you get to take a mandatory lesson in combinatorics. Consider the "couple" emoji. A couple should be any combination of two human emojis of any race and gender with repetition allowed (to allow same sex and/or same race couples). A family of three or four has even more combinations (consider interracial couple with adopted children). What about unconventional families, single parents, anyone? Why is there no emoji for an extended family? No wonder the family emojis are still nuclear and yellow.

I really wonder about the combination of ignorance of Unicode, stick-in-the-mud attitude to diversity and appetite for accidental irony that makes someone write a long paragraph (570 characters - that's at least 10^170 combinations of characters - basically impossible to store) about how it's impossible in 2016 to apply combining characters to emoji (which is how the diverse emoji are already implemented).

I didn't imply that it's impossible. I just mean it is silly. Imagine that you need to pick out your particular family emoji each time from all the possible combinations. Perhaps you would need to enter your race when you create a Google or Apple account to alleviate this. Or perhaps the vendor has already analyzed the cloud stored pictures of you and your family members, determined the age, race, gender and the resulting family tree and handily preselected the appropriate emoji for you. I mean this is an exaggeration, but that's how ridiculous I think single "human" emojis already are.

If you want to respond in a way that shows who you personally are, send a picture, today's messaging apps together with front and back facing cameras make it easier than ever before. If you want a quick impersonal throwaway response, there's always a yellow emoji. The in-between "catered to you" emojis are an awkward, uncanny middle ground.

> I just mean it is silly.

What's your point in bringing up combinatorics then?

> Imagine that you need to pick out your particular family emoji each time from all the possible combinations.

Imagine using the most trivial kind of UI (literally a LRU cache would do the job) so that emoji you use more often are presented first. In fact, you don't even need to imagine, because this is how they already work on Android.

I have to wonder why you are dedicating so much energy to problematizing uses of emoji that you disapprove of without really seeming to know much of them. If they don't work for you maybe just don't use them?

I'm going to leave this link in the rather forlorn hope that something about it might take root:

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_kimmel_why_gender_equality...

These days when I have to send the :thumpsup: smiley on IMs I am presented with a list of 6 different coloured smileys, I end up not using smileys at all, it is rather annoying to have race/sex/colour to a smiley. Come on they are cute little pieces of graphics, don't put a sex/race/colour to it! It all started with whatsapp, they'll say in the future.

Whoops, lost the footnote [1] while editing the comment.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/10/...

Suddenly emojis becomes embedded SVG images...

yeah I'll miss them too.

Read a blog post recently about emoji[0] that pointed out that by going to human emoji, you end up having to make weighted decisions about diversity. For example, the kiss emoji in the Google set was two genderless blobs, but in the new version the default one is M/F....

Basically the blog goes on to point out how Apple has kind of taken control of emoji design decisions thanks to the ubiquitousness of iphones.

App developers having basically only iphones has taken its toll. People include apple emoji even in android versions of their app! Basically you end up seeing google emoji only inside hangouts...

[0]:https://eev.ee/blog/2016/04/12/apple-did-not-invent-emoji/

I understand the point here and agree to some extent, but on the other hand I think using a standardised set of emojis makes sense for cross-platform communication apps such as Whatsapp, as I think the meaning of some of them is reasonably subtle and those subtleties are very much influenced by the specific design - for example, the Apple "person with folded hands" shown in the article clearly represents prayer to me, whereas the original Google one looks kind of creepy with its screwed up face. I found this to be an issue when I had a windows phone - for better or for worse, emoji are used quite a lot, and I sometimes had to think back to the iOS equivalent to make sense of them, as they looked so different.

In my opinion Apple's take on emoji is both the most visually attractive (the proportions of the old Google ones are way off and the "slug" creatures quite visually unappealing) and the richest, so it's no wonder they have become the de facto standard. In fact, I'd wager emoji wouldn't have taken off anything like as well as they have if everyone saw the original Google versions, for example, as they lack the "cuteness" and charm of Apple's versions.

What might be nice is if Apple were to make them fully open source - I've wondered before what the legal status of apps like Whatsapp embedding them in their app is.

> the Apple "person with folded hands" shown in the article clearly represents prayer to me, whereas the original Google one looks kind of creepy with its screwed up face

I don't think Google's version of the character is supposed to represent prayer, but rather asking for a favor (which seems much more useful):

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_PlaWxKgYl60/TSvvov-JHbI/AAAAAAAAAB...

http://stat.news.ameba.jp/news_images/20150114/10/9a/z1/j/o0...

http://cdn-ak.f.st-hatena.com/images/fotolife/r/ranmaru-24me...

yeah it's supposed to be the typical Japanese "pretty please?" pose. Extra reason why I really don't get what apple was trying to accomplish with the prayer hands.

The issue I have with Apple's emoji is that some of them (like the "praying one") just do not follow the "spec" described.

The hands totally don't match the "person with folding hands" definition of the Unicode codepoint. Might as well use wingdings...

The unified look is useful, just wish they would stick to things that match the description at the very least.

That's a fair point, didn't even occur to me!

I wish Google had added the emojis to the appstore years ago and made them updateable independent of the OS release. My phone will not get the upgrade to N so I am stuck with the old emojis unless I install CM14 in the future.

Another problem is that there are way too many emojis on the keyboard and it takes ages to find the right one. There should be a "long press -> hide this emoji" option in the keyboard to get rid of the 75% you will never use.

Rather than hide, I'd have them "sink to the bottom" or add a "hidden page" with the opposite semantics (unhide on long press). This prevents mistakes and allows people to create a workflow where they only whitelist (or filter to top) certain emojis, while still having access to ones they didn't think they needed.

That sounds like a good idea. For each category/page you can move your 20-30 most favorite emojis to the top.

No need to install CM14, with root you can replace NotoColorEmoji.ttf in /system/fonts

Better yet, a search function where each character has proper descriptions.

If you've ever used LINE, they have a really nice inline emoji suggestion function, where as you type words a list of possibly related emoji appear (presumably they have them tagged with various keywords).

Everything else about LINE is terrible, but I'd love it if everyone just copied that particular interaction.

Swype does this too, although I never really use them, it is a cool feature.

Swiftkey has this, and it really changed the game for me because it baked emoji discovery directly into my typing flow.

Slack places the "recently used" emojis on the first page. That works really for me.

Yes, but the "recently used" emojis constantly move around based on their usage. I'd rather have them in a fixed place for muscle memory.

As does Android, actually.

And iOS.

Here is the Verge's take on the new emojis http://www.theverge.com/2016/4/13/11423722/android-is-finall...

Slightly off-topic point about that article/the Verge.

Is it just me, or is it in the Verge’s style guide for writers to assert their opinion as if it were one everyone holds. I guess it’s supposed to be light-hearted and funny, but it just seems snarky and pseudo-authoratative.

Here the writer’s tone is “well thank God for that, finally Google has listened to the overwhelming majority of people, for whom this was a big problem.”, and as evidence they link an article which provides none for that point.

The Verge isn't doing its research (as usual): The blob emojis are not going anywhere (it's just the "people" emoji that are being changed). See screenshots at http://www.droid-life.com/2016/04/13/whats-new-in-android-n-... for example.

Agreed, and make them green or blue if the yellow is not racially generic enough.

I hate them. They look like something out of the 90's design.