Need Family Emojis

The Unicode Consortium made the decision back in 2015 to make the family groups more inclusive, as those particular emoji didn't have skin color choices.

Apple was just the first to fully implement the change. They've been replace by these silhouette things.

🧑‍🧑‍🧒‍🧒

This is a user-to-user forum. You are not addressing Apple. The folks that do work for Apple may or may not read postings around here.

Emoji are part of an international standard known as Unicode, and Unicode is intended to address the text communications needs of the roughly eight billion people all sharing this tiny rock hurtling through space.

Apple, Google, Microsoft, and many other vendors implement the Unicode standard.

For emoji, the Unicode consortium decided that the then-current emoji design was headed for an explosion of complexity — quite possibly with more than seven thousand new character sequences needed for the family emoji involved, depending on the design selected — and the committee decided to use a simpler approach.

For an introduction to the complexity:

• http://blog.unicode.org/2024/03/breaking-cycle.html

For more technical details of the implementation:

• https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20196-gender-skintone-update.pdf
• https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2020/20114-family-emoji-explor.pdf

The appropriate organization for your more general request is the Unicode Emoji committee.

The usual proposal path follows (though your request to edit the existing set is much wider):

• https://www.unicode.org/emoji/proposals.html

Yes, it does seem somewhat inconsistent. As you mentioned, you can choose individuals and couples with their skin choices, but never for families or other group emoji.

Per MrHoffman, it's at least partly about space. If you still had all of those extra group emoji and added skin color choices, then each skin color requires using up another code point.

While 32,768 sounds like a lot of code points for one font, it's less than a drop in the bucket compared to how objects there are. It's the reason known people aren't allowed. If you put in George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King, then where do you stop without someone complaining about being excluded?

With the list of ZWJs including for hair, age, gender, skin color, the permutations and testing and storage requirements involved can all increase rapidly.

Absolutely! You could fill the entire font with just variations of people.