The new lineup of emojis is dominating the news cycle and social media feeds everywhere — and for good reason. The most recent update includes a slew of highly-anticipated emojis such as male and female redheads, a cupcake, superheroes, and more. For this reason, it should come as no surprise that many of us — myself included — are very eager to put these digital expressions into every day use. Suffice to say, these emojis have been a long time coming. If you are asking yourself why you don't have the new emojis for Unicode 11.0, just sit tight and be patient. They are coming to your mobile device soon.
On Tuesday, June 5, more than 150 new emojis were announced (157, to be exact). This is great news, right? Right. So with all of these brand new emojis floating around, you are probably wondering why you can't get them on your own device just yet. So when can you expect to be able to send your friend the llama or lobster emoji? Most of us can expect to see them sometime in the second half of 2018, according to the Emojipedia blog.
Device platforms like Apple, Microsoft, and Google tend to wrap new emojis into a larger software bundle rather than releasing them as their own update, according to Emojipedia. This means that just because the new list of emojis is officially available, the maker of your device is not quite ready to unleash them to you just yet. Emojipedia ran the data, and based on previous release dates, they came up with a working timeline as to when your device may possibly receive the latest round of emojis.
Microsoft users, and those who use the EmojiOne keyboard extension app, are most likely to be the first crop of users to receive the recently released emojis. Based off historical trends that Emojipedia analyzed, it is expected that these mobile device and app users will have access as early as June or as late as August of this year.
For those of you with an Apple or Google device, you should be privy to the Unicode 11.0 release between September and December — but probably not before then. For example, Apple deployed last year's new emoji lineup into their November 2017 software update even though Unicode 10.0 was released in mid-June of that year.
Samsung users could wait even longer than that. Emojipedia predicts that Samsung will not make the 2018 emojis available to users until January or February 2019. It is unclear when WhatsApp, a messaging app, will incorporate Unicode 11.0.
For the time being, you may just have to get your emoji fix on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter (once they become available). These sites have the capability to incorporate and release the Unicode 11.0 update at any time, and are expected to do so this summer, according to Emojipedia. Fingers crossed that by Labor Day Weekend I will be tweeting and updating my status using the lobster, firecracker, and luggage emojis to celebrate the end of summer.
Keep in mind that these possible release dates are just predictions from Emojipedia based off historical trends, so there must be some degree of accuracy here. Still, you should be frequently checking for software updates to your phone just in case the emojis decide to come earlier than expected. As a general rule of thumb, it is always a good idea to install any software updates to your device as soon as they are available. I know these things take time, but the sooner the better. For now, I will just keep checking for software updates.
