[ad_1]
Emojis have become an important way to share emotions and intentions in messages, especially due to the difficulty in conveying your tone through the right words. New emojis are frequently added to the Unicode standard and, in general, operating system upgrades must be released to support these new emojis at the system level. Google has made efforts to update the font file containing the new emojis without the need for an Android system update, and today the company hinted that it was a feature. Android 12.
In a blog post, Google also announced that hundreds of fun little icons – 992 to be exact – have been tweaked and improved to make them more universal, accessible, and authentic, and there are some new ones as well. For example, the emoji of a “pie” is now less American and refers to a “pie” as most people may know, rather than a pumpkin pie.
According to Google, all apps that support the Appcompat library will automatically receive the latest emojis from Google. No matter how old your phone is or how long it takes to update your apps, from Android 12 you will get the latest emojis in apps that use Appcompat. Currently, you can get the new Android 12 emojis on any rooted Android device, but rooting is obviously not very user-friendly. Nothing is as easy as having your apps automatically pick up all the new emojis themselves.
Our friends at Android Police did some research to find out more about this ad. If you’ve been following Android for a long time, decoupling emojis from the Android system might sound familiar. It certainly rang a bell for me, and I wasn’t sure why. In the end, in 2017, Google said pretty much the exact same thing when it announced the support library called “EmojiCompat” which worked at API level 19 or higher (Android 4.4+). Proprietary apps like Gboard and Google Messages are taking advantage (and that’s why you can get new emojis in Gboard), but very few third-party apps do. Basically, it may not be part of the system, but rather something that developers actually need to adhere to. So, we don’t know if today’s announcement is in fact related to the newly added support for updating font files through Google Play services.
When Android Police contacted Google, they asked why a main module had not been implemented instead. “Mainline” in this case would mean that it is part of Android’s core services, but rather it is a change focused on the GMS kernel which is part of Google Play and Android Jetpack services. Google’s response was tantamount to saying that a change built into the core of GMS required “no additional developer work”, and that sticking to the EmojiCompat approach means “it will work on older devices.” This seems to ignore the fact that Google is specifically announcing this as an Android 12 change.
Uncoupling emojis from the Android system is something that many people have been clamoring for for a long, long time. Whenever new ones are released and iPhone users get them first, you’ll likely end up communicating poorly due to the lack of context of an emoji that could be used on the other side. Because they are considered “fonts” and the fonts can finally be updated in the / data partition on an Android smartphone, you strength be able to get updates that will include emojis in the future through Google Play services.
Either way, updatable emojis improve the quality of life which may seem silly to some people, but given that emojis have become such a big part of our vernacular it is important that they are easily updated and updated whenever necessary. We hope that’s certainly part of the equation, anyway.
[ad_2]
Source link