Love it or hate it: a lot of people use emojis to convey a variety of emotions as it allows them to do so in a lesser amount of time with fewer taps of the keyboard. Typically, support for new emojis on Android and iOS devices comes with system updates such as Android 11 and iOS 14.2. Now, a new report claims that Google may be looking to decouple this dependency on Android system updates.
As spotted by the folks over at XDA, Google has made several commits to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) Gerrit to achieve this purpose. Currently, all fonts and emojis are stored in a read-only system partition so updating them requires either rooting your phone and having a go at modifying system files yourself or waiting for a system update.
The new commits on the Gerrit indicate that Google will allow the "system_server" process read-write access to the system directory, which essentially means that the company will be able to roll out support for new emojis faster than before.
It is important to note that these commits have not been merged as of yet, so there's no assurance that this change will even happen. However, if they do get merged, we should probably see this change happening with Android 12 which is supposed to bring in at least 217 new emojis with Emoji 13.1 in 2021.
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