Apple has removed family emojis from its operating system. What is the reason for this decision?
Apple has done a commendable job with emojis in its ecosystem. There is no doubt that the evolution of emojis on iPhone has gone in the right direction, Apple emojis have a very attractive design and have even been adapted for modern times with the birth of Memojis and Animojis.
Additionally, the malleability of Apple’s software has allowed users to use emoji tricks and even combine multiple emojis to express their emotions more precisely and accurately on the Internet.
However, unfortunately, The evolution of Apple emojis has brought some drawbacks… The company introduced new emojis in iOS 17.4 but had to mysteriously remove others. Join us to find out what happened.
Apple removed family emojis in iOS 17.4
Indeed, With the release of iOS 17.4, Apple has decided to remove family emojis. A series of emojis showing different family members with different genders and skin tones. What is the reason for this radical change? Does Apple hate happy families?
Nothing could be further from reality. Apple loves families and has worked hard to provide an inclusive digital environment in its emoji collection. But It was precisely the inclusion that ended up transforming the family emojis… into simple silhouettes.
Apple offers different skin variations for each of its emojis
Additionally, family silhouette emojis – which are noticeably much less pleasing to the eye than their predecessors – are now available. They are located at the end of the emoji panel, among the special symbols. Which makes its use much less likely.
Apple replaced family emojis with these silhouettes
What happened? Well, early on, the Unicode Consortium decided that all tech companies had to design emojis with different skin tones and genders. Something reasonable in traditional emojis but not so much in families. Now the platform appeals to multiracial families. If we take into account all the combinations of gender and skin tones in family emojis… There could be up to 52,000 emojis!
This would have caused a real collapse of the system and, therefore, Apple decided to remove these emojis. An alternative would have been create a personalization tool for users to decide which type of emoji to use. But the resulting emoji would not work on other platforms.
So for now, if you want to use a family emoji, you’ll have to make do with the new family silhouettes in iOS 17.4. The original family emojis had a yellow complexion, but apparently for the Unicode platform it wasn’t inclusive enough. What do you think?
