August 1st, 2016 is the day where Apple releases the next iteration of iOS, tvOS, macOS and watchOS. In addition to that, the Cupertino-based company also updates and redesigns over a hundred of emojis.
What the emoji update is all about, is to bring more options to existing characters. While the yellow smileys, cat faces and hand gestures all got a bit of a design refresh, some emojis were completely overhauled. This includes the symbols depicting sports, which now all have a male and a female version.
Other activities, like dancing, haircuts and massage have added a male version too for even further gender parity. The detective emoji has a new female version as well.
To make this happen, "Apple is working closely with the Unicode Consortium to ensure that popular emoji characters reflect the diversity of people everywhere," said the company.
And as for the "scary" emoji that represents a realistically-rendered revolver introduced on previous iterations, Apple removed it. The company replaces it with a cuter bright green water pistol. The pistol emoji will however continue to appear as a revolver on some other platforms.
Apple was one of the companies that objected to a rifle emoji being included as part of Unicode 9, when it was suggested as part of a new line of olympic-themed images.
Express More With Emojis
Emojis have become popular as people communicate with others with their devices more often. In iOS 10, Apple is going all in with emojis, and that include QuickType word suggestion bar to suggest an emoji based on the word the user is typing. In Messages for example, emojis are made three times bigger.
Emojify feature and the emoji keyboard, iOS 10 is where Apple dives deeper into the diversity of emojis.
The release is Apple's effort to ensure the characters and symbols represent the variety of people who use smartphones. Like previously on iOS 9.1 released in 2015, Apple opened up the emoji option to include different skin option.
And as the release for iOS 10, Apple stages the update because the OS version isn't released to the public. The new versions first come to developers' servers so that only people that pay $99 a year for a developer account can test it out. Any major bug found or reported, should be quickly patched until there are none major bugs anymore found. Until them, the public betas of iOS 10 and macOS Sierra should receive their updates in just a few days.