It's not just events and product releases being delayed due to the impact of coronavirus. Clearly, human lives are at stake too, but almost as importantly, the emoji are also being affected. The Unicode Consortium has just decided to postpone the release of v14.0 of the Unicode standard for six months, upon which a future round of Emoji is set to be based.

Since Unicode V14.0 hasn't been published yet (in fact, it hasn't opened submissions yet), we don't know which emoji this will delay, though there's enough of a buffer in the process that Android won't be affected for a while. We only just got the new Emoji 12.1 characters, and we're still waiting on Emoji 13.0 to land with Android 11. So while there won't be any immediate impact, this could result in an emoji delay for a future Android release.

The deadline for submissions to the Emoji 14.0 standard is also being pushed out until September 2020, and it's mulling over the idea of an interim Emoji 13.1 release that expands on existing characters.

The Unicode Consortium hesitates to directly state that the delay is due to the impact of the coronavirus, but the announcement is clear that it's a result of contributors having "A lot on their plates at the moment" as a result of current circumstances. In the words of Mark Davis, President of the group: "This year we simply can’t commit to the same schedule we’ve adhered to in the past." That may mean an extra wait for us sometime in the next year or two before we get whichever new emoji end up included in the Unicode 14.0 standard.

Source: Unicode blog