The emojis They have changed the way we communicate, replacing words or phrases with a simple drawing that expresses a feeling, expression, action, animal, object, food, symbol, etc.
Considering their popularity, they are constantly evolving, adding new emojis every year and operating systems redesigning their design every few versions to update them, just like Android 11. The problem is that sometimes Emojis update more than mobiles, and that’s what Google wants to avoid.
Updatable emojis from the Play Store
Currently, Emojis are updated through a system update, with and if Unicode Consortium launches a new version of Emojis, we have to wait for a new version of the operating system and its update to reach mobile phones. This means that users can wait months to use and display the new Emojis on their devices. This is if they are lucky enough to receive an update, because on average after two or three years, cell phones stop receiving updates, and therefore, there may come a time when your cell phone does not recognize not some emojis.
To avoid this it looks like google wants to update emojis from play store, and is that in the Android source code (AOSP), some changes have been detected that refer to this future functionality.
Currently, Emojis are stored in the directory / system / fonts, which as the name of the folder suggests is the system partition, so it is only read, it can only be written if you are root. But recent source code updates are moving sources to / data / fonts / files
Add the / data / fonts / files directory:
The updated font files will be stored in / data / fonts / files and all applications will read them to draw text. Thus, / data / fonts / files must be readable by applications and only writable by system_server (and init).
Configure the / data / fonts directory for updatable system fonts:
– / data / fonts / files The updated font files are placed in this directory. The files in this directory are readable by all applications. Only the system_server can write font files to this directory.
– / data / fonts / config The font configuration used by the systemserver is stored in this directory. Single systemthe server can read / write this directory.
Based on the source code comments, the updated font files will be stored in / data / fonts / files and all applications will be able to read these fonts, but not modify them either, which can only be done by the system_server (and init) process.
Everything indicates that Google is separating text fonts and emojis from the system partition so that it can update them through the Play Store as it already does with other system components. So, if Unicode launches new Emojis, they could reach all mobiles within days, and mobiles whose support ended years ago.
Vía | XDA Developers
