Google recently announced the release of 53 new gender-fluid emoji on Pixel phones. The emoji, which will be available in beta version, will be added to all Android Q phones later in the year.

 

Reports suggest that the emoji are specifically designed to appear neither male nor female. This is to enable a more simplified emoji keyboard with universal characters. It looks more like a more modern interpretation of the default little yellow man emoji.

 

 

The original 176 symbols, initially released in 1999, have evolved into over 3000. They range from entirely new characters and symbols to gender, race and interracial couple emoji, and Bitmoji by Snapchat. The new Android Q will be more inclusive, but it makes the emoji keyboard harder to understand.

 

The genderless emoji design can also pose a problem. This is because Unicode, a non-profit group that works like the United Nations to maintain text standards across computers, did not specify a gender standard. An emoji design that may be in a particular gender in one device might appear as another gender in another device, thereby causing some confusion.

 

The new emoji approach by Google varies between different characters. While some have genderless mid-length hair, a genderless person has arms across its bare chest to obscure it. The Dracula emoji also has its clothes changed to portray no gender.

 

 

Google designer Jennifer Daniel admits in an interview with Fast Company,

“There is no singular way of getting it right, Gender is complicated. It is an impossible task to communicate gender in a single image. It’s a construct. It lives dynamically on a spectrum. I personally don’t believe there is one visual design solution at all, but I do believe to avoid it is the wrong approach here. We can’t avoid race, gender, any other number of things in culture and class. You have to stare it in the face in order to understand it. That’s what we’re trying to do–to [find] the signifiers that make something feel either male or female, or both male and female.”

 

At the moment, the 53 new gender-fluid emoji are an exclusive Google project. This means that they are still a little pointless because if they are sent to a non-Google smartphone, they will appear with a specific gender. But Google thinks other companies will come on board and adopt a similar emoji pattern. Daniel hopes that the new gender-inclusive emoji will become the new keyboard default.

 

 

Meanwhile, if you are looking to enable the gestures in the Android Q beta, you can follow these few steps:

• Open the setting app and go to “System”.
• Click “Gestures”, and then tap “System Navigation”.
• Now toggle on the “Fully gestural navigation”. This will replace the navigation buttons with a long thin line at the bottom of the screen.
• To reverse the procedure, simply follow the steps again.

 

The Android Q preview will bring several new features that look almost iPhone-like. Once activated, the home button will disappear and require you to swipe up to go to the homepage. You will also need to navigate back and forth through apps to go move around.