Android 10: Android hops on the gender-neutral, inclusive train

Android 10’s gender inclusive emojis are taking the internet by storm. Android 10 is out with gender neutral emojis. These emojis aren’t new but are replacing some previous emojis which assigned a gendered appearance to a lot of non-gendered emojis.

Google is now the sole major vendor to follow the Unicode guidelines which state:

“Human-form emoji should normally be depicted in a gender-neutral way unless gender appearance is explicitly specified.”

All of the current skin tone convertors are accessible for all likely combinations of the people holding hands, letting the representation of interracial couples come up; and none of these couples are heteronormative, getting enough representation for both gender and race on Android for the first time.

Emoji 12.0 also features an assortment of innovative accessibility-centred emoji groups.

Those that provide representation to either a disabled person (e.g. Woman with a probing cane) or representation to a non-mechanical body part (ear with a hearing aid). They also come in a range of skin tone modifiers, so all human form emojis are given representation regardless of ability, gender or race.

Live Transcribe, Live Caption and Sound Amplifier make audio possible for everyone, everywhere. This makes it user-friendly and compatible to people with hearing loss, helping marginalised disabled people. This is a huge step to step towards inclusivity.

All 230 new Emoji 12.0 additions are avilable in Android 10: 61 new emoji codepoints and 169 new recommended ZWJ sequences.

Here are Android’s official statements about the same.