Unicode's Emoji 12.0 candidates for iOS 13 include more skin tone combos & handicap options

The Unicode Consortium on Tuesday showed off 236 draft candidates for Emoji 12.0, which should make its way onto Apple platforms sometime in 2019 with iOS 13 and macOS 10.15.

Some of the proposed additions include skin tone variations for multi-person characters, such as "holding hands," which will have 55 combinations of skin tones for same- and opposite-sex couples. The six multi-person emoji without specific genders will have five skin tones that can be mixed and matched for diverse families.

50 of the new emoji — incorporating gender and skin variations — are themed around accessibility, such as "woman in manual wheelchair."

Image Credit: Emojipedia

Some other incoming characters include a sloth, a flamingo, a kite, and a white heart, Emojipedia noted.

Emoji 12.0 won't be cemented until after Consortium's next Technical Committee meeting in January, the goal being a March launch. Even then it will likely take companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft some time to actually implement the standard.

In fact Apple has yet to support Emoji 11.0 in iOS with just two months left in the year. That will be fixed with the impending release of iOS 12.1, which will add over 70 new characters, such as more hair options, including none at all.

23 Comments

rwes 11 Years · 200 comments

About 6 years ago

Would welcome a way to search emoji, right in the iOS keyboard...

difficult to know/guess which keywords are tied to certain emoji so that after typing you can pick it.

JWSC 7 Years · 1203 comments

I want an emoji face with a drool bucket. That way I’ll feel included.

entropys 13 Years · 4316 comments

The amount of attention Apple devotes to emojis is eleventy zillion times more than it should. The Esperanto of mobile phone users.

Where are new Macs?

randominternetperson 8 Years · 3101 comments

I'm offended that they don't offer variations on facial hair, hair styles, and body shape. If I can't get a male-male couple with a fat, dark-skinned, bald guy with a Hitler mustache holding hands with a slightly fatter, albino, guy with a mullet and a neck tattoo how will I not feel marginalized. (I'll let you guess which of those, I am.)

Or maybe they should go back to the yellow cartoon people and call it a f'ing day.

georgie01 8 Years · 437 comments

Once upon a time very few people cared. We saved our recognition of discrimination for real issues. It wasn’t until the ‘victim’ mindset became mainstream that average people started to think they are being mistreated and discriminated against just because there isn’t something like an emoji there to represent them. As a culture, we consider ourselves and how we feel as far too interesting and important.