With the end of the year quickly approaching, the Unicode Consortium is out with a fun study today showing off the emojis that were used most throughout 2021. While the smiley/emotion category was the most popular overall, the new report breaks down nine different emoji categories by the most and least used.
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Following a promise by Apple way back in March to introduce more racial diversity to the icons used in Emoji characters, Google and Apple contributors have now posted a proposal of how to make it a reality. The draft standard will extend the current icon set to include five color variants for Emojis including people and faces. The variants are distinguished by Fitzpatrick skin categories, although exact colors are up to the platform vendor (Apple, Google, etc) to interpret.
Apple responded to recent inquiries about the lack of diversity among the emoji characters that ship with iOS, saying that the company is working with the Unicode Consortium to remedy that.
Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.
Apple first introduced native support for the Emoji character set on the iPhone with iOS 5. A few character additions shipped with iOS 6, but that was the last update mostly because they’re based on a cross-platform standard and need to remain consistent across devices. That’s why it is important for Apple to work with the Unicode Consortium to update the standard to include more characters.