The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the delay of 2021’s new slate of emojis.
The forthcoming release is now set for 2022, CNN Business reports. Unicode Consortium—the non-profit that reviews emoji standards and supervises new releases—announced this week that its schedule has been pushed back by six months. The global health crisis has delayed the nonprofit’s ability to develop the new version of the emojis’ Unicode Standard, which is updated whenever operating systems are updated.
Every year, the new emojis are approved in January and then made available when iOS and Android operating systems are announced, usually in September. “Under the current circumstances we've heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment and decided it was in the best interests of our volunteers and the organizations that depend on the standard to push out our release date,” Mark Davis, president of the Consortium, said in a statement.
The set back won’t affect the release of 2020’s 117 emojis, which include the transgender flag, the gender-neutral Santa Claus, the disguised face, ninjas, anatomical body parts, smiling face with a tear, new animals and food, parents feeding baby, and more. This year’s animated characters were announced in January and will debut in September.
