On one hand, Twitter is continuously pushing to induce growth into its micro-blogging social platform, while on the other it has today announced a rather nifty update. Twitter’s designer Bryan Haggerty has tweeted that they’ve updated the existing emoji set to add 69 new images and bring the platform at par with the Emoji 5.0 release.
? ? We’ve just added all the new emojis to https://t.co/LOTAlBvtUR and updated our Twemoji open source repo ? https://t.co/lD0IvE7ifj
— Bryan Haggerty ? (@bhaggs) May 23, 2017
Twitter’s custom emoji set, known as Twemoji, is available on GitHub and has been updated to version 2.3 to include these 69 new icons — which amounts to 239 if you take into account skin variations as well. Haggerty also mentions that some of the emojis may take up more than one character in the tweet because:
some emojis, while presented as 1 image, are made up of multiple unicode character codepoints.
The Emoji 5.0 icons have been released just last week and Twitter is probably the first online platform to adopt the same. The emoji introduced in this update are — some new flags, starstruck emoji (as seen above), the women with a headscarf, mindblown icon and others. With this update,
The Twemoji library offers support for 2,661 emojis, including skin tone and gender modifiers.
I know you’re excited to checkout the new emojis and are gearing up to fire up the Twitter app on your smartphone. But, wait. The new emojis are supported on Twitter’s website, but the mobile /desktop operating systems haven’t yet added support for the same. Thus, the new emojis are presently not available on the iOS, Mac and the Android Nougat apps just yet.
We can expect support for Emoji 5.0 icon set to roll out to the micro-blogging platform in coming weeks — with iOS 11 and Android Nougat. Tweetdeck, the most loved Twitter app, will support the new emojis very soon, says Haggerty. So, get ready to express your thoughts with even newer emojis. Google has recently given its emojis a facelift, leaving behind the blob design aesthetic in favor of traditional circular icons.
