Brace yourselves (or your phones): Apple is finally ready to unveil its updated selection of emoji.
After what seems like forever to have lived without adequate pictograms, the emoji at our fingertips will finally represent a more diverse range of races. Someone testing Apple's new OS leaked screenshots of the update that is rumored to be launching in beta in mid-March.
Now, users can tap and hold a human-looking emoji to reveal a selection of skintones. The new batch of racially diverse characters span six different shades. Thanks to a Unicode update — a.k.a. the reason why our devices can read and understand emoji — the animated folks will now encompass a wider "aspect of human appearance." (Though, Unicode stressed in a proposal last November that it would not encompass the human experience in full.)
The new update also features a wider array of family emoji, with racially diverse and same-sex familial units, and more countries' flags, too. And, who knows? We've been creatively texting to avoid the obvious lack of a bacon emoji, and an Easter egg would be a nice timely addition, too. Point being: Check your phones next month for a whole new, very necessary, vocab. (The Next Web)