Emoji cannot be stopped. Apple has announced there will be 72 new emoji in iOS 10, including new foods, activities and even olympic sports (except shooting, for obvious reasons). There’s a selfie emoji, a face palm, other hand gestures and animals, plus tons of emoji whose meaning will quickly be subverted by comic minds.
The new emoji were proposed in the recent Unicode 9.0 release, and have already been confirmed by Google to be coming to Android N and Microsoft to Windows 10. The images shown above are mockups from emojipedia; the actual emoji for each OS will likely differ in style.
There’s some obvious synergy with the new ‘Emojify’ feature in the upcoming iPhone update. This feature adds a button to the keyboard which highlights all words in your message that could be replaced with emoji, and then lets you tap on each word to quickly swap in your pictograms of choice. With 72 new emoji on the table plus the hundreds of choices already available, iOS 10 should be a messaging paradise.
Are you excited for the arrival of new emoji? Spotted any promising symbols? Let us know in the comments below — bonus points for emoji usage here, of course.