Emoji, in the present time, plays a vital role in communication. A message without emoji seems heartless to almost all users. Emotions are best expressed using emoji. However, users have to wait for the operating system to upgrade each time Unicode releases a new emoji.
Google, the master company, recently has come up with a solution to minimalize the wait. Information released recently suggests that Google is trying to separate emoji from the Android system update to make it easy for users to use new emoji without waiting for an update from the Android.
Fonts in the Android system currently get stored in the system-fonts directory, and emojis nest in a file called NotoColorEmoji. As the system partition is ‘read-only’, to update any file in the partition the system needs to be updated, particularly when the partitions are not mounted.
Hence, there is absolutely no way out but to wait for the official OTA update before using new fonts and emojis. A new submission was found on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) Gerrit, which seems to separate the font file from the place where the operating system needs to be upgraded.
On the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), a new submission, having the ability to distinguish font file from the place
Add the /data/fonts/files directory:
The updated font file gets saved in /data/fonts/files, and in order to draw texts all applications have access to read the saved files. Thus, data/fonts/files are required by the application to be, and writing access is granted only to system server.
These submissions allow the system server to write updated font files into the /data/fonts directory. As the data partition method is read-write, google, by making the required modification, permits only the system server process to gain permission to write to this directory.
By this modification, Google has paved the way for all the applications to read fonts and emoji files from this directory to draw text, enabling the updated font files and the new emoji to get featured in the mobile phone without an OTA update.
However, the date from which the change will happen is still uncertain as these submissions required merging, and if the merging gets done within the coming few months, it can be expected that users can hope to get this change in the coming Android 12.