Facebook has introduced a more diverse set of emojis on its Messenger platform for both iOS and Android.
With this, there are now over 1,500 emojis now available, of which there are at least 100 that are designed to “better reflect gender and skin tones.” It also marks the debut of a female police officer, runner, pedestrian, surfer, and swimmer, all of which Facebook claimed are among the first to be seen on any platform.
Apple’s iOS already had on offer emojis that depicted women as dancers, ballerinas and princesses or office workers.
Facebook said that the new pack of emojis offers a more balanced view of the world around us, something that users have always wanted out of them.
“We’re diversifying the genders to create a more balanced mix that’s more representative of our world,” said Facebook in a blog post.
That is not all as Facebook also introduced the feature that allowed users to adjust the skin tone of the emojis to their liking. The feature was already available on iOS and is already touted for launch in Android later this year. Users can set a default skin tone from the settings menu or long pressing on the particular emoji to toggle the skin tone.
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Another nice feature with the latest update is that the emojis will henceforth be baked right within Messenger itself. It led receivers to view the emojis in a slightly different light than the sender might have sent them, something that could often lead to misunderstandings. Not so anymore now that emojis have been made consistent across all platform.
Unfortunately for Windows users, the new changes aren’t coming to them though that might change in future. Windows has always been sort of an afterthought for Facebook. It had introduced apps for its social network platform as well as Messenger and WhatsApp for Windows 10 much later than Android and iOS. It will follow a similar schedule with the new Messenger emojis as well.
