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Comment by ollin | Hacker News Reader

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/ 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.

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When will people learn that old/new comparisons should go left to right for people that read left to right?

Personally, I read English in the boustophedron style. Sometimes it's the only way to unlock those Satanic back-masked messages!

more confusingly, it swaps direction between the wipe comparison and the side-by-side just below it!

Why 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?

You 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.

Ah, 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.

Thanks! 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?

Cat smiling and cat smirking are two separate emoji. Why the article depicted them as before-and-after is a mystery.

Yeah, 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:

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