Google updates nearly 1,000 emojis in Android 12

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Emojis have become an important way to share feelings and intent in messaging, especially because of the difficulty of conveying your tone of voice through just words. New emojis are added frequently to the Unicode standard, and OS upgrades are usually required to support those new emojis at the system level. Google is making the font file containing the new emojis updatable without the need for an Android update, and today the company hinted that this is a feature in Android 12.

In a blog post, Google also announced that hundreds of fun little icons – 992 to be exact – have been optimized and improved to make them more universal, accessible, and authentic, and there are also new ones. For example, the emoji for “pie” is now less American and refers to “pie” as most of the world knows it, rather than pumpkin pie.

According to Google, all apps that support the Appcompat library will automatically get the latest emoji from Google. No matter how old your phone is or how long it takes to update your apps, starting with Android 12, you’ll get the latest emojis in apps that use Appcompat. Currently, you can get the new Android 12 emojis on any Android device, but rooting is clearly not all that easy to use. Nothing is as simple as just having your apps automatically pick up all the same new emojis.

Our friends at Android Police did some research to find out more about this announcement. If you’ve been following Android for a long time, the separation of emojis from Android may sound familiar. The bell definitely rang for me, and I wasn’t sure why. As it turns out, in 2017, Google said pretty much the exact same thing when it announced the support library called “EmojiCompat” which worked at API level 19 or higher (Android 4.4+). First-party apps like Gboard and Google Messages take advantage of it (which is why you can get new emojis in Gboard), but very few third-party apps do. Basically, it might not be part of the system but something that developers actually need to be involved with. Thus, it is not clear to us whether today’s announcement is actually related to the newly added support for updating font files via Google Play Services.

When the Android Police reached out to Google, they asked why the main line module was not implemented instead. “Mainline” in this case means it’s part of the core Android services, but this is instead a GMS-oriented change that’s part of Google Play Services and Android Jetpack. Google’s response amounts to saying that the integrated change to the GMS-core requires “no additional developer work”, and that sticking to the EmojiCompat approach means “it will work on older devices”. This seems to ignore the fact that Google is specifically advertising this as a change to Android 12.

Separating emojis from Android has been something that many people have advocated for a very long time. When new emojis are released and iPhone users get them first, you are likely to end up with miscommunication thanks to the lack of context for emojis that might be used on the other side. Since they are considered “fonts” and you may finally be able to update the fonts in the /data section on your Android smartphone, you may be able to get updates that include emojis in the future through Google Play Services.

Either way, updateable emojis are a quality-of-life improvement that may seem silly to some people, but given how emojis have become such a huge part of our slang, it’s important for them to update them easily and bring them up to speed anytime necessary. Hopefully, that’s definitely part of the equation, anyway.

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