There won’t be any new emoji on phones in 2021 due to the pandemic

One unexpected effect of the coronavirus pandemic has to do with the colorful little pictograms we use on our phones and computers to express, well, pretty much everything: emoji. 

According to the Unicode Consortium, a non-profit which takes care of the Unicode Standard – a widely-used standard for character encoding on computers and phones – the release of Unicode 14.0 has been postponed by six months. 

“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 Unicode Consortium, said in a statement. 

Unicode 14.0 was supposed to be released in March 2021, but that has been moved six months into the future, to September 2021. Since it takes a while for developers to incorporate new emoji into phones – typically eight months or so, according to the Consortium – this means we won’t get any new emoji until well into 2022. 

Obviously, this is a very minor nuisance compared to the death toll and the economic rampage stemming from the coronavirus pandemic, but it’s still notable, especially given the increased online communication (emoji included) while vast areas of the world are in partial or total lockdown. 

There are two silver linings to this news, however. 

First, it doesn’t affect the Unicode Standard version 13.0, which was announced in March this year, meaning we will be getting those emoji, a total of 117, this fall. 

Second, the Consortium says it’s considering releasing some new emoji in a 13.1 release by using emoji sequences, which combine several existing emoji to create new ones, and wouldn’t require a new version of Unicode to work. If the idea goes forward, we would likely see at least some new emoji on mobiles in 2021. 

COVID-19 has so far killed more than 81,500 and infected more than 1.3 million people. In the U.S., there have been more than 431,000 confirmed cases and 14,768 deaths.