Android fans really, really don’t like it when cool things come to iOS first. That was the case this week when iPhone users upgrading to iOS 9.1 got a massive new batch of emoji from Unicode 7.0 and 8.0. that includes the highly coveted middle finger emoji. Android users don’t yet have access to these new characters and the Android Reddit community is not happy about it.
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“So iOS got new emojis yesterday and our iOS counterparts are sending us things we can’t see,” wrote Redditor WoozleWuzzle in a thread posted on /r/Android on Thursday. “Does Android have any plans on how to stay on top of this? […] I know it’s silly, but as emojis become the cultural norm for communicating and then a big part of the user base can’t see the form of communication that is a problem.”
The Redditor’s plea received over a thousand net upvotes and got predictably trolly comments such as this one:
Yeah, well 🖕🏻🖕🏻 to the whole lot of you all.
I’m gonna go eat some 🌮
That said, they did raise a fair point: It would indeed be frustrating to have one of your iPhone-wielding friends send you a middle finger emoji that you aren’t even capable of seeing and responding to.
Google’s new Android chief Hiroshi Lockheimer has heard Android users’ pleas and says that he and his team are working to get the new emoji onto Android as soon as they can:
So I have a feeling y'all want new emojis? a) Thanks for the feedback, b) We're on it, and c) Sorry!
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) October 23, 2015
So it sounds like this story has a happy ending, although as with all things Android, we have no idea how long it will take to push new software out to the platform once it’s ready to go. It’s always possible that Google can make support for the new emoji available as a download via the Google Play Store instead of tying it directly to an OS update, which would speed up the process by quite a bit.
