The ugliest emoji in the world come courtesy of Android. They’re blobs that look nothing like what other platforms have to offer, and they can be quite confusing. Oh, and did I mention how ugly they are? Thankfully, Google is finally ready to admit that its old Android emoji design game isn’t working anymore, and the company is going to offer users a brand new set of emojis once Android O rolls out. And they’re not going to be blobs.
“We’re doing a full redesign of the emoji set,” Android Product Manager Gus Fonts told Fast Company . “We took a look at many things, but mostly the thing that’s most striking is, perhaps, that yes, the candy dots or blobs, are now substituted with a set of squishy circles–for a lot of good reasons.”
Apparently, redesigning the emojis hasn’t been an easy task for Google. The company spent 18 months on redesigning them, as it also had to rethink how and why it represents humans the way it does. Yes, gender and race will play major roles in Google’s emoji redesign, in line with what you can expect on other platforms.
As for the overall design of the new emojis, they’ll be similar to what’s available on iPhone and other platforms, as the blobs are going away for good.
“Emoji is a balance of symbolism and actual representation of the real thing,” Fonts added, referring to blobs as “peanuts.” Whatever you call them, they’re still ugly.
He continued, “We were on one extreme before with the peanuts, and now the other has real representation. What we saw was, if you go too far in that [representational] direction because you want to be inclusive, people don’t see themselves represented, and they’re not going to use it. You have to have enough specificity to represent you enough, but not so inclusive that your emoji palette is hundreds of thousands of emoji.”
Of course, if your Android device isn’t going to support Android O, you’ll be stuck in blob emoji hell forever until you decide to switch to a newer smartphone.
