Google finally ditches its ugly, blob emoji
The company's smiley faces will look more like those found on the iPhone -- when Google releases Android O.
Android O will feature redesigned emoji.
Goodbye yellow blobs. Hello, new Google emoji.
Yes, that's right. Google's finally changing its hideous old emoji for the next version of its mobile software, Android O. Instead of blobs where it's almost too difficult to tell what the face is actually doing, the new emoji will look more like what you get on an Apple iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy phone.
Google spent 18 months working on a full redesign of its emoji, according to Fast Company.
Google's old emoji, pictured here, will exist no longer with its next Android update.
"We took a look at many things, but mostly the thing that's most striking is, perhaps, that yes, the candy dots or blobs, are now substituted with a set of squishy circles -- for a lot of good reasons," Gus Fonts, product manager of Android, told the publication.
Part of the reasoning behind the change was making it easier to communicate with people using non-Android phones. Google also took pains to design gender stereotypes out of its emoji, Fast Company said. That included putting female emoji in pants and ditching pink for girls.
The new emoji will roll out with Android O later this year. It may still be awhile before your phone has them, though. Google released its current Android software, Android N, in August 2016, but only about 7 percent of phones ran the software as of May 2. The majority of Android devices in use run Lollipop or Marshmallow, which were released in 2014 and 2015, respectively.