Arab News Japan

The current pandemic has caused various industries to shut down, but an unexpected one is running into some issues; emojis on smartphones.

Unicode Consortium, which is the organization that approves new emojis, said in a blog post that due to the new coronavirus (COVID-19), the launch of version 14.0 of the Unicode Standard would be postponed by six months, from March to September 2021.

This delay might mean that users will not be able to play around with the new set of emojis until early 2022 since there is usually a gap between the announcement of new emojis and when they are actually available.

Unicode Consortium President Mark Davis said in the blog post, “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. This year we simply can’t commit to the same schedule we’ve adhered to in the past.”

However, the delay in the version 14.0 will not affect version 13.0 of the emoji set, which will become available this fall.

Version 13.0 will include the beaver, polar bear, tamale, and ninja emojis. It might also take advantage of emoji sequences, which are made up of existing emojis—like making a black cat emoji out of the regular cat emoji and the black large square emoji—and don’t require the coding of new characters.