WhatsApp Adds New Emoji For All Ethnicities: Both On Web Version And Android App

WhatsApp now introduces new sets of racially diverse emoji. The popular instant messaging application decided to roll out the new emoji for both the web version and the beta version of its Android app.

For long, WhatsApp has only been available for mobile devices until January 2015 when the company rolled our WhatsApp Web. It is basically an extension of WhatsApp on phone. The web version works with Google Chrome, Opera Mini and Firefox.

The regular emoji used to depict faces and other body parts was from Caucasian origin. From now onwards, along with human faces, hand gestures will also be available in five more skin tones. A tiny little triangle will be visible at the bottom of these emojis. The users need to tap and hold on to a particular emoji to select the desired skin tone. The selected skin tone will become the default choice until changed.

WhatsApp has more to offer. The Vulcan Salute or Spock Hand emoji will also be available in different skin tones. This particular sign was added by Apple in iOS 8.3 but WhatsApp brought it Android and made it accessible to all. However, the ethnically diverse emojis including the new Spock hand emoji will be visible on the recipient’s Android device only if they have downloaded the latest version.

Apple released racially diverse emoji to its OS X operating system in April as well. It included redesigned emoji keyboard with skin tome modifiers.

The Unicode Consortium, a body for developing, promoting and maintaining software internationalization standards and data, specifies the representation of text in modern software products. They provided support for racially diverse emoji which enabled users to choose faces and body parts on the basis of their skin tone.