By: Nick Gambino
Get ready, 217 new emojis will hit your iPhone this year. Those little pictograms have practically replaced words or, at the very least, helped accentuate the meaning of those words, but no matter how many options we have to choose from, there never seem to be enough.
All the new ones come from the Emoji 13.1 list approved by the Unicode Consortium, the group responsible for the standardization of emojis and other text across numerous written platforms.
A couple of hundred new emojis will certainly help, but I’m not sure it’s quantity that’s missing, so much as it is quality. I’ve said it before, Skype has one of the best collections of emojis in any messaging app or OS I’ve seen. A big reason for that is the emojis are animated. There’s the guy hitting his head against a brick wall. There’s the guy throwing a thumbs up. There’s the guy waving his hand. Basically, there’s a little yellow guy in action in nearly every emoji.
It’s clear that’s not where iOS is going with their emojis, so we’ll just have to settle with a ton of new stationary, stagnant pictorial symbols. The new set being released as part of iOS 14.5 will see brand new emojis like “Face in clouds,” “Face with Spiral Eyes,” “Exhaling Face,” “Mending Heart” and “Heart on Fire.”
There are also a ton of expansions on existing ones and redesigns of oldies. We’ll see additional skin tones and genders in emojis like “Kiss” and “Couple with Heart.” News was made recently about the syringe emoji being redesigned with decidedly less blood so as to make it less graphic. By doing away with the blood, they’ve made it so the syringe can be used to signify a vaccine, something that’s currently on all our minds.
Speaking of redesigns, and because Apple can’t help but promote themselves, they’ve redesigned the “Headphone” emoji to look like a pair of AirPods Max.
Most of us will see the new emojis on our phone when we update to iOS 14.5 this spring, while there are a select few developers who will see them in the iOS 14.5 beta 2 out now.
