Hiroshi Lockheimer, the VP of Android and Chrome at Google, today took to Twitter to announce that the company will start rolling out an update for Nexus devices from next week that will add support for new emojis to the OS.
After Apple rolled out iOS 9.1 with support for new Unicode 6.0 emojis in late October, Google received a lot of flak from Android users for not supporting the latest set of emojis in Marshmallow. Lockheimer had then tweeted that Google is working on adding support for more emojis to the OS.
Look! New emoji coming to #Nexus next week. Fonts and tech details shared with OEMs to include in their updates too. pic.twitter.com/GwvKw2d67p
— Hiroshi Lockheimer (@lockheimer) December 3, 2015
This update will be an updated version of Marshmallow and not an update to Google Keyboard. It is likely that Google is bundling support for additional emojis with its monthly security maintenance release, which is also due to be rolled out to Nexus devices this month.
Lockheimer also states that Google has shared the updated fonts and tech details with other third-party OEMs so that they can include the changes in their firmware as well. However, don’t expect other OEMs to rollout a similar update to their devices before a month or two.
