Apple unveils 70 new emoji characters coming later this year.
World Emoji Day 2018, similar to each iteration since 2014, is on Tuesday, July 17. World Emoji Day was founded by Jeremy Burge, the creator of Emojipedia, which is an unofficial Wikipedia for emojis. Ever since instant messaging took over the reins of day-to-day communication, emojis or emoticons have been frequently used by people to express their feelings in a way that is comprehensible to the recipient. On the occasion, Facebook and Twitter have released statistics and infographics that reveal the volume and preferences of emojis across the world, including India. Facebook has also released two new features. Separately, Apple has released 70 new emojis in celebration of World Emoji Day, and also updated the bio photos of its leadership team with Memoji. Dating app Tinder has also released infographics for World Emoji Day, including one for India.
Facebook has introduced two new features including a camera frame and a themed text element to help users express themselves better with emoji. As per statistics revealed by Facebook, users on the social networking platform frequented the <3 heart emoji twice as much as this year compared to last year. With a total of 2,800 emojis available in Facebook’s catalogue, almost 2,300 are used every day on the platform. And, there are over 900 million instances of emoji responses, without text, on Facebook Messenger daily. More than 700 million are used on Facebook posts each day, with the biggest day being New Year’s Eve (December 31, 2017) that saw the highest amount of emojis shared on both platforms.
In India, the most popular emoji on Facebook and Facebook Messenger was the Cake emoji, which is probably used by millions of Indian Facebook users to send birthday wishes to people in their friend lists. Facebook users from the US and UK used the ‘crying while laughing’ emoji the most, also known as ‘joy’.
Even Twitter came out with its top emoji list for the period of July 2017 – June 2018. The most popular emoji on the micro-blogging platform in India is the ‘crying while laughing’ emoji. Other popular ones include the pray emoji, the smile emoji, heart emoji, fire emoji, thumbs up emoji, kiss emoji, and more. Twitter claims that it has actively introduced new thematic emojis across relevant events of culture, entertainment, sports, and news.
Apple
Apple has something in store for emoji-loving millennials. The Cupertino giant has announced 70 new emoji characters that will arrive on the Apple Watch, iPad, iPhone, and Mac later this year as part of a free software update. Created based on the latest Unicode 11.0, the new list of emojis includes characters based on animals such as a kangaroo, peacock, parrot, and lobster. Apple is also adding new food emojis for mango, lettuce, cupcake, moon cake, and other popular items. A new superhero emoji, and emojis for a softball, a nazar amulet, and an infinity symbol will also make it to Apple’s range of devices.
Apple is not stopping there. On the occasion of World Emoji Day 2018, the company has releasedcustom emojis – Memoji, or personalised Animoji – based on avatars of its top management. These include emojis for CEO Tim Cook, Chief Design Officer Jony Ive, SVP – Software Engineering Craig Federighi, and others.
Tinder
Dating app Tinder has also released its infographics for World Emoji Day 2018. The most used emoji characters in profile bios in India include the ‘laughing’ emoji, the cup of coffee emoji, car emoji, dog emoji, pizza emoji, camera emoji, and more. According to Tinder, Indian users on the app make use of emojis to describe their personalities, interests, and allegiance to things like coffee and pets.