Apple’s New Emoji Will Be More Diverse

In an effort to be more inclusive, Apple will be providing users with more diverse emojis, to “ensure that popular emoji characters reflect the diversity of people everywhere”.

Apple recently collaborated with Unicode Consortium to conceptualize female emojis of a swimmer, runner, mountain biker, surfer, weight lifter, basketball player, construction worker and detective characters.

What do you think of Apple’s newest emoji for the upcoming iOS 10? These emojis were seen by many as a violation of Russia’s law against “gay propaganda”.

Perhaps, more emoji will also get visual updates by the time iOS 10 ships to the public in the fall. But among the biggest announced Monday by Apple is the replacement of a pistol emoji with that of a water gun.

IOS 10 is now in beta mode for developers to tinker around with ahead of its release after the launch of Apple’s latest phone, but based on the current Unicode 9 standard, a number of emojis will miss out on the initial iOS release.

It’s replaced the gun with a water pistol and put out new designs it hopes will be more inclusive.

But Apple’s decision does not mean all gun emojis are going away. A rainbow flag and two different gender options that depict families with single parents are also included. And some female-only characters have also expanded to include men in the dancing, massaging and hair-cutting emoji.

The new operating system includes several updates to Apple’s messaging app, including “predictive emojis” – which will automatically highlight words in text that can be replaced with emoji.