Nothing summarizes the marginalization of American hockey fans more than the emoji keyboard. That sounds silly, but I’m serious!
Every hockey fan knows how frustrating it is to open up that emoji keyboard every time there’s a new update and … well … OK, there’s soccer and basketball and football and baseball and tennis and rugby and golf and skiing and cycling and horse racing and running and …. dangit, they forgot hockey again, huh?
BUT GUESS WHAT??? They didn’t forget hockey this time!
Emojipedia has the rundown, but the basics are this: Unicode Consortium, the Illuminati-like people who dictate the emojis we all get, released a version called Unicode 8 on Wednesday. In the new version are 37 totally new emojis including the one you see above. They also added volleyball, field hockey, badminton, cricket and ping pong emojis in the sports category. Other important additions include a hot dog and popcorn and a taco.
When will I get the new emojis?
Update: the hockey emoji is expected to debut on iPhones with the release of iOS 9 on September 16 — although we may have to wait until version 9.1 comes out in November. We’ll find out tomorrow. No word on timeline for Android.
It depends. The next step is for companies like Apple and Google and Microsoft to actually adopt the new Unicode 8 standard. It could be rolled out in a routine update, or for example with Apple it could wait until the fall when they release iOS 9. It’s totally up to them.
But either way: HOCKEY EMOJI IS COMING.
