Google has bowed to pressure from vegans and taken the egg out of Android’s salad emoji.
This isn’t something iPhone users need concern themselves with, as Apple’s version is already meatless.
While less dire, Google’s change is reminiscent of the controversy surrounding the Pistol emoji. At the urging of activists, Apple, Google, Samsung, and Twitter have changed this from a weapon to a squirt gun
Vegans eat a lot of salads, so it’s not surprising they objected to Android’s inclusion of something they’d never consume. Especially as emojis have become such an integral part of communication for so many people.
More salad in the salad emoji
A twitter post from Jennifer Daniel, the UX-Art Manager of the Expression design team at Google, explained the reasons for the change. She said, in part, “We’ve removed the egg in Android P beta 2, making this a more inclusive vegan salad.”
A follow-up tweet from Daniel pointed out that “the goal of salad emoji redesign was to create an image more faithful to unicode’s description. ‘A bowl of healthy salad, containing lettuce, tomato, and other salad items such as cucumber.’ ”
Hello carnivores, vegans and everyone in between! Just want to clarify that the goal of salad emoji redesign was to create an image more faithful to unicode’s description. “A bowl of healthy salad, containing lettuce, tomato, and other salad items such as cucumber.” Bon appetite!
— Jennifer ?? (@jenniferdaniel) June 6, 2018
What in your bowl?
Before this change Google was off by itself in this. “Green Salad” was added to the official list of emojis in 2016, and Android had the only version with meat.
Apple’s emoji designers clearly enjoy tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions on their salad, and the same goes for Twitter.
Someone at Samsung is really, really into peppers, though.
An emoji primer
When someone sends an emoji to a friend, the image isn’t transferred. Instead, Unicode numbers are sent. It’s up to the device to turn the number into a picture.
That’s why Android’s salad image looks very different from Apple’s.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
