It took around a month, but Google has come through and delivered on CEO Sundar Pichai’s promise to “address the issue” of what makes for the correct emoji for a burger. The cheese has to sit on top of the patty, and not below it. The new emoji was made available along with the developer preview for the Android 8.1 OS released by Google on November 27, 2017.
Here’s a quick history lesson for those wondering why this makes news. On October 28, 2017, writer and media analyst Thomas Baekdal sent Twitter and most of social media in to a tizzy with one single tweet.
I think we need to have a discussion about how Google's burger emoji is placing the cheese underneath the burger, while Apple puts it on top pic.twitter.com/PgXmCkY3Yc
— Thomas Baekdal (@baekdal) October 28, 2017
The tweet went viral, leaving millions on social media debating the correct way to prepare a burger. Google received quite a lot of backlash for their emoji, which eventually led to Sundar Pichai (CEO, Google Inc.) stepping in.
Will drop everything else we are doing and address on Monday:) if folks can agree on the correct way to do this! https://t.co/dXRuZnX1Ag
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) October 29, 2017
The new emoji doesn’t really effect Google’s revenues, but it does give the company a lot of buzz. #BurgerEmoji is trending again, and this time, most users and media articles are praising Google’s effort to keep and make good on a public promise. Will it make for a great case study for real time marketing? Probably not. However, the entire story will definitely remain in the social media zeitgeist for the foreseeable future.
FYI, companies are allowed to create their own interpretations of the symbols approved by the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit that sets the global standard for emoji and any other input characters. So, will any other phone company (LG, Samsung, HTC, etc.) or tech giant (Facebook) change their burger emojis too? Erm, watch this space?
P.S. Emojipedia was the first to note the change, and it says that Android 8.1 also includes tweaked beer and cheese emojis. Android users can check these out for themselves by installing the Android 8.1 developer preview. Otherwise, just wait for the public version which is due later this year.
