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This article seems fairly uninformative since, as others have pointed out, there's no visualization or comparison of the full emoji set and no link to see it. T
by ollin 3mo ago
This article seems fairly uninformative since, as others have pointed out, there's no visualization or comparison of the full emoji set and no link to see it. They just show a few example images and have some (AI-enhanced?) prose that doesn't actually say very much.
This article https://9to5google.com/2026/05/12/android-17-emoji-redesign/ https://9to5google.com/2026/05/12/android-17-emoji-redesign/ has a larger (2d image) comparison grid with several dozen examples and an A/B slider vs the old versions. Overall the new design looks like a fairly tasteful compromise between Google's previous flat-shaded vector emoji and the hybrid 2d+3d Apple emoji, with the benefits (easier to rerender with higher-resolution, animations, tweaked lighting, etc.) that you'd get from a fully-3D pipeline. So I like the new set of emoji, just not this particular blog.google.com article.
- magicalist 3mo agoYeah, looks like that article was from an I/O announcement of these new emoji (which I don't remember, but I also didn't watch much of the keynote), and they've decided to tease this until it finally lands in the next version of android. What's the overlap of people excited about new emoji and also read blog.google? OTOH, I guess they didn't ask to be posted to HN. :shrug:
- echoangle 3mo agoWhen will people learn that old/new comparisons should go left to right for people that read left to right?
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agoPersonally, I read English in the boustophedron style. Sometimes it's the only way to unlock those Satanic back-masked messages!
- rcxdude 3mo agomore confusingly, it swaps direction between the wipe comparison and the side-by-side just below it!
- ComputerGuru 3mo agoWhy did the cat get an evil smirk? It seems like adding rain to the umbrella potentially breaks the existing meaning? What’s the emoji that went from three colored circles on a stick to three completely ambiguous widgets?
- starshadowx2 3mo agoYou have the order of which are the old ones and which are replacements backwards. The "three coloured circles on a stick" are dango, that before/after is actually a mistake as the before one is the oden emoji, not the dango emoji. The smirking cat one is also a different emoji than the normal cat one, so there will be new versions of both.
- xg15 3mo agoAh, thanks for the info they are different emoji and the diagram is just wrong. Was thinking the same how such a redesign could lead to misunderstandings.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- xg15 3mo agoThanks! That other link was much more informative. I think it's a bit annoying that for some emoji, they still change the content and not just the style. It's not as bad as the "gun/watergun controversy", but I think especially that cat emoji could lead to messages being interpreted differently, depending which version of the emoji you see. The corporate link in the OP was gushing endlessly about the sophisticated ways to communicate emotions that are ostensibly enabled by emoji, so shouldn't then companies at least make sure the emojis consistently show the same thing?
- cosmicriver 3mo agoCat smiling and cat smirking are two separate emoji. Why the article depicted them as before-and-after is a mystery.