Emojis Delayed by the Coronavirus

EMOJIS DELAYED BY THE CORONAVIRUS

The 2019 novel coronavirus has changed our lives a lot in the past couple of months. From transitioning to remote learning and remote working, to wearing a mask in public, it’s amazing how different our lives are now from just three months ago. And it’s crazy to think of the multitude of things that the virus has affected.

In fact, believe it or not, even emojis have been affected by the virus!

Yes, you heard that right…emojis. Those tiny colorful pictographs that have made their way onto our computers and phones, and into our hearts.

According to this article from mashable.com, the Unicode Consortium (a non-profit which takes care of the Unicode Standard, a widely-used standard for character encoding on computers and phones) has announced that the release of Unicode 14.0 has been delayed by 6 months. It seems that the reason behind the delay is because Unicode’s contributors just have too much on their plates right now. And because it generally takes around 8 months for developers to get those adorable emojis into phones, we likely won’t see the new batch until 2022.

There is some good news, though. Unicode 13.0, has not been affected, so we will still be seeing over 100 new emojis this fall.