Image by Emojipedia
It seems not even emojis can escape the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Unicode Consortium, a non-profit organisation that works on the Unicode Standard, has announced that the Unicode 14.0 will be delayed by 6 months. This pushes the release date to September 2021. At the same time, Emoji 14.0 will also be delayed until 2022.
According to the consortium, this delay is due to the lack of manpower at this current time. This is because the Unicode Consortium enlists the help of volunteers to work on the Unicode Standard and new emojis. As a result of the current pandemic, these volunteers have more things to worry about than working on new text encoding standards or emojis.
Fortunately, the unreleased Emoji 13.0 is still on schedule and should be available in mobile devices around September 2020. The consortium is also considering incremental updates, such as an Emoji 13.1 release where new emojis are a combination of existing ones. This way, there would be no need to wait for the next encoding version to be ready. If this happens, this supposed Emoji version 13.1 would be available in 2021.
Although many of us use emoji, it's fortunate that this particular delay won't have a major impact on us. Regardless, we're looking forward to the new ones that will help us express ourselves in new ways. Having said that, do you use emojis often and do you have a favourite? Let us know on our Facebook page and stay tuned to TechNave.com for more news.
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