The latest thing to be delayed due to the coronavirus? New emoji

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With the coronavirus canceling everything from sporting events to delaying tech product releases, it probably shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that another delay is upon us. This time in the form of our precious emoji.

The company that develops emoji for smartphones, Unicode Consortium, announced that Android and iOS operating systems will not be receiving new emoji on the pre-defined date in March 2021. In the post, it was noted that they would be delaying the release of version 14.0 of its emoji standards by six months. This means that new emoji will be released in September 2021 at the earliest, with them not hitting phones until 2022.

“This delay will affect specifications and related data, such as new characters and emoji,” explains the consortium. Defending the delay, the company stated that the approval process for new emoji is a very time-consuming process and can take upwards of six months and that the company heavily relied on the efforts of volunteers, who, due to the effects of the virus outbreak, “have a lot on their plates at the moment.”

From what we know, the possible emoji that would arrive with Unicode’s 14.0 package include a crow, pots, and fingers, as stated by Jeremy Burge, who runs Emojipedia.

What do you think? Surprised to hear that new emoji are being delayed due to the coronavirus? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

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Murtaza Islam

Murtaza is a Computer Science student who takes immense interest in mobile technology. He believes the future of computing lies in smartphones because ARM architecture will eventually take over. He also loves to tinker with ROMs and kernels keeping up with the latest in smartphones.