There Won’t Be Any New Emoji Next Year Due To Coronavirus

Due to COVID-19, the release of next year's new emoji will be postponed by six months according to The Unicode Consortium, the organisation in charge of developing the official emojis of the world. Which means, after this year, no new emoji until 2022. But don't worry — Unicode Version 13.0, which was announced earlier this year and includes 62 new emoji as well as 55 gender and skin-tone variants, will still make it to our phones this fall as planned.

The reason for next year's delay? The development of new emojis relies on volunteers who simply don't have the bandwidth necessary right now due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“Under the current circumstances we’ve heard that our contributors have a lot on their plates at the moment and decided it was in the best interests of our volunteers and the organisations that depend on the standard to push out our release date,” says Mark Davis, President of the Consortium. “This year we simply can’t commit to the same schedule we’ve adhered to in the past.”

As for Version 14.0, which ordinarily would be slated to be released early next year and on our phones by autumn 2021, the Unicode Consortium said it will still be accepting emoji proposals between June 15 and September 1, 2020. The difference is that they'll be announced in September of 2021 and won't roll out until 2022. For now, at least we're getting a new set of emojis as promised in autumn, including Pinched Fingers (like a chef's kiss), Bubble Tea, People Hugging, Disguised Face, and Ninja.