The addition of skin tones in emojis has been a nice but cumbersome feature. Most keyboards will show a pop-up when you use an emoji with skin tone modifier options, thus requiring two taps to insert a thumbs-up or facepalm or astronauts or dancers and dozens of other emojis. Worse yet, the different keyboard apps almost never remember your choice, so you have to do this for each emoji the first time you use it. Gah.

Fleksy keyboard has just done the right thing: in the app's settings on Nougat and above, you can now select a default skin tone, which will then be applied to all of the modifiable emojis. So you won't have to go through the trouble of choosing a skin tone for every emoji. Neat. Also, the skin tone will be applied in your keyboard too so you can see how things look from the first go. Even neater. The only issue I can find is that you can't seem to be able to tap and hold to trigger a different tone for those instances when you might need to use one: you'll need to change the setting, insert, then change it back. Not neat.

WHAT'S NEW

Happy 2018 everyone! To celebrate this new year, we bring you a new fleksyapp: Memes!

And, due to popular demand.... now you can choose your emoji skin tones in Settings (Nougat and above only).

Happy typing!

I'm not a Fleksy user so I'm not sure if the entire skin tone support is new or only the option to select a default one in settings. Regardless, the latter is a neat feature and even though it won't steal me away from Gboard, it's one I wish Gboard and WhatsApp and many other keyboards supported. I like my emojis yellow, like they have been since I started using MSN in the previous millennium, and I don't want to keep manually choosing them.