A little later than the original “coming weeks” promise
The last stages in the Hangouts to Chat transition are building up. Just before Workspace-subscribed Hangouts users are pushed to Chat, Google has given Chat’s web clients the same updated emoji it delivered to the Android app last summer — it took a little longer than the “coming weeks” previously promised.
The change brings the Emoji 13.1 set to the Chat web client — the version of it that lives in Gmail, as well as the PWA you can install (confirmed by harassing people in my contacts list with random 13.1 emoji). That means you can send more and different kinds of emoji now via the web client, and they’ll appear as they would on the mobile clients. Previously, some of the 13.1 emoji would be rendered differently or as a combination of two other emoji.
Highlights among the newly added emoji include a flaming heart, dizzy face, and a sighing face, as well as modifications for additional skin tones and adding a beard to faces. Gender-neutral options for gender-modifiable emoji have also been added, and skin and gender preferences can be saved per emoji.
The change comes just ahead of the death knell for most Hangouts clients for mobile and web on workspace accounts, scheduled to begin on March 22nd. Customers will still be able to access Hangouts directly at hangouts.google.com, but other options will redirect, and Gmail for those accounts will switch to Chat. A similar transition has yet to be scheduled for personal accounts, but we have to assume it’s coming. (Note all this applies to Chat, the Hangouts replacement, not Google Chat, the company’s branded RCS service in Messages. Google is bad at names.)
For those that already made the trip from Hangouts to Chat, now you have the same emoji available across platforms.
Read Next
About The Author
