While Wednesday’s shareholder proposal to address workplace diversity was shot down, Google is making strides elsewhere—albeit on a much smaller scale. Behold the eggless salad emoji, revised to respect vegans.
The newest emoji updates for Android P users were shared on the company’s developer blog yesterday. The revision of the existing salad emoji to omit the egg was only one of the 157 new emoji scheduled to grace Android P beta 2. Additions of a red-haired, silver-haired, and bald individuals were among the changes.
“There’s big talk about inclusion and diversity at Google,” Jennifer Daniel, head of design for Google emoji, tweeted yesterday. “So if you need any evidence of Google is making this priority may I direct your attention to the emoji—we’ve removed the egg in Android P beta 2, making this a more inclusive vegan salad.”
There's big talk about inclusion and diversity at Google so if you need any evidence of Google is making this priority may I direct your attention to the 🥗 emoji— we've removed the egg in Android P beta 2, making this a more inclusive vegan salad. pic.twitter.com/kzHY0A9ZjG
— jennifer daniel (@jenniferdaniel) June 6, 2018
However, not all Google emojis were given the star treatment like the coveted sans egg salad. Only very specific emoji received major updates Daniel told The Outline. “There has to be a really good vision why we’re going to revisit something, because it’s already a part of the lexicon that people are working with,” Daniel said.
The authenticity of the emoji lexicon seems to have always been extremely important to the team at Google. Last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai began the annual develop conference by announcing the beloved (but problematic) cheeseburger emoji received a makeover. Rest assured, the cheese now directly blankets the patty, not inexplicably sitting on the bread.
Changes to existing emoji, according to Daniel, are considered through a combination of three things: update requests from users, what the emojis of other brands look like, and whether the emojis clearly match their unicode description.
Feedback on specific emojis are submitted as bug reports. In this case, the green salad was created to address a user’s complaint about the egg-contaminated emoji not matching its corresponding unicode description: “A bowl of healthy salad containing lettuce, tomato, and other salad items such as cucumbers.”
Google emoji images are used on stock Android devices (such as Pixel phones), Gmail Web Interface, Google Hangouts, and ChromeOS. As of 2018, these images are also used on in Slack on non-Apple platforms such as Windows, Linux, and Android.