Android gets extra human emojis: Verge misreports

The Verge headlines an article "Android emoji will actually look human this year", and spends some time rejoicing over the new human emoji's, and the ability to select the skin tone of them stating that it's "a feature that's been in high demand". The "alien like slug" or "blob-like" as Verge calls our little emoji-friend, is 'terrible' and they claim 'completely indecipherable' when it travels between platforms.

*sigh*.

I am the only Android user in the office, I know you iOS people think your emoji's are the gold standard, but sometimes confusion stems from the fact that out of all the emoji's out there, it's the Apple iOS "grinning face" that doesn't look like a smile, in a sea of other emojis that do. Research has been done on this. Just maybe once, Apple should fix their grin, instead of everyone else fix theirs. Because the potential of miscommunication is high. I suspect we'll get an emoji-standard as quickly as we got tag standards between web browsers. Remember marquee and the blink tag?

Still, my beef with the Verge article isn't just that I'm getting defensive over the adorable blob emoji that I love being called ugly, but their blatant misrepresentation of the Android update. The blob emoji, our non-human, bright yellow, smiling (and sometimes crying) slug, is not being replaced by human looking emojis in every skin color known to man - they're an addition to the set. This is not made clear at all over at The Verge. The only real change to our friend the blob-slug emoji is that none of them turn to the side any more, which is a shame because I loved to flirt with these guys. D'aaaaw.