February 24, 2015
Apple's New Emojis Are More Diverse, Include Same-Sex Couples
Jason St. Amand READ TIME: 1 MIN.
iPhone users will soon get a more diverse emoji selection, including a number of LGBT-friendly emojis, when Apple updates the phone's iOS.
Photos of the iOS 8.3 leaked this week ahead of its scheduled release for later this year after Apple gave developers an example of the upcoming, highly anticipated, operating system.
The new emojis will also allow users to select from six different skin tones, and will offer a selection of family-based emojis, which include children posing with two mothers and two fathers.
Apple is also adding 32 new country flags
As CNN Money reports, diverse emoji people are just some of the 300 new emojis that will be included in the upcoming iOS 8.3. The website notes that Apple promised to make its emojis more diverse in March after some Internet backlash, including an online petition and Miley Cyrus even tweeting about the lack of inclusiveness.
"Apple supports and cares deeply about diversity, and is working with The Unicode Consortium to update the standard so that it better represents diversity for all of us," an Apple spokesperson told CNN Money.
To create the new skin tones, Unicode, the standard for text, numbers and emojis across all platforms, used the Fitzpatrick scale, which was originally created by dermatologists to classify different types of skin.
