Apple wants to add five new inclusive emoji for different professions
Are you a female astronaut or a male judge? Apple has your back.
As spotted by Emojipedia, the company has requested male and female variations of five new professions be added to the next Unicode update -- an artist, a firefighter, a pilot, an astronaut and a judge.
Apple has previously indicated its desire for the additions, but we finally have examples of what the new emoji could look like.
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In case you're unfamiliar, the Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organisation that standardises characters and symbols online, creating the Unicode Standard. Members of the consortium include Apple, Huawei and Google.
The last major Unicode update was version 9.0, and it caused a hubbub thanks to the inclusion of the bacon and avocado emoji. According to Emojipedia, Emoji 4.0 should be released in November, so they're likely to be available on your phone later in the year or early 2017.
The Consortium's aim is to assign a unique number to every symbol online so that it can appear across software and devices "no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language." In other words, if you send a love heart emoji from an iOS smartphone to an Android, they don't want you to see that irritating white box.
Apple has been ahead of the curve when it comes to inclusive emoji. In early August, it announced that iOS 10 software update would come with female versions of the runner, surfer, and basketball player, among other characters.
P.S. If you're a professional windsurfer and think you deserve you're own emoji, here's how to pitch to Unicode.
Topics Apple
Ariel Bogle was an associate editor with Mashable in Australia covering technology. Previously, Ariel was associate editor at Future Tense in Washington DC, an editorial initiative between Slate and New America.
