“Emojis are not born, they are made” – this is how those responsible announce a new round of the submissions. How do new emojis actually get on your smartphones, which you can then send on WhatsApp, Telegram and Co.? Behind this is a lengthy process.
In the beginning, there is sometimes a proposal of a single person, which is then waved through or repelled by the Unicode Consortium. With a good idea and a bit of luck, an emoji from your head could be included in the upcoming version of Emoji 16.0.
To do this, you first have to check whether your desired emoji is not already in the library of more than 3,600 emojis. If this is not the case, however, it could already be in the review process (as is currently the case with emojis for a crow, ginger or a goose, for example). This year, Emoji 15.0 will be released, but now the submissions for the next generation have been opened.
The emoji application is long and not straightforward
If, after these steps, you are still convinced that you are on the trail of an unrealized emoji, you can start making an official application. In the course of this, you have to justify the need for your emoji and even make a first visual suggestion (although the visualization is left to the various platform operators, such as Apple, WhatsApp or Twitter).
At the moment, any kind of flags has a bad chance of being implemented. For the sake of fairness, the Unicode Consortium for country flags refers to the ISO 3166 standard and when a new country is added to this list, it automatically receives a new emoji. New identity flags such as 🏳️ 🌈 or 🏳️ ⚧️ will not be available as quickly as the last quarterly report of 2021:
Such flag proposals come with significant challenges, such as.B their transience (many identity flags have changed since their addition in 2016) and their justification (the inclusion of an identity raises the question of why other identities are not included as well, and presupposes the expectation that any identity should be supported, which is not suitable for either Unicode or the providers).
The legendary story of 1Live presenter Gero Simone, to whom we owe the disco ball emoji, shows that suggestions from the community can be quite successful. By the way, the current submission phase runs until 31 July. What kind of emoji are you still missing?