Coronavirus Outbreak: Release of new emojis for 2021 delayed by 6 months due the pandemic

Unicode Consortium has informed that it will postpone the release of emoji version 14.0 by six months due to the outbreak of COVID-19. It was scheduled to debut in March 2021 but will now be available in September next year. This year’s set of emojis, which were a part of Unicode Standard version 13.0, were released in March. [caption id=“attachment_7214901” align=“alignnone” width=“1024”] The Consortium said it is considering whether it is feasible to make available emoji sequences in an Emoji 13.1 release.[/caption] The Unicode Consortium relies majorly on the efforts of its volunteers. “Under the current circumstances we’ve heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates and decided it was in the best interests of our volunteers and the organisations that depend on the standard to push out our release date,” President of the Consortium Mark Davis said in a company blog. The Consortium said it is considering whether it is feasible to make available emoji sequences in an Emoji 13.1 release. The blog mentioned that the sequences depend on combinations of the existing characters in the Unicode Standard and can be implemented on a separate schedule. This means that they don’t require a new version of Unicode or the encoding of new characters. Unicode Consortium said that the Emoji Subcommittee will begin to accept new emoji character proposals for Emoji 14.0 from 15 June to 1 September 2020. Any new emoji characters included in Emoji 14.0 would appear on phones and other devices in 2022, it added.