Overview
All those positive little jerks like the OK sign, peace sign and thumbs up are about to have a pesky new emoji neighbour — Microsoft has added a middle finger to your array of textual gestures, as announced by Emojipedia (it's a thing).
Scheduled for released mid-2015 and only available in the latest update to Microsoft's upcoming operating system, Windows 10, the middle finger emoji has been long awaited by flirty teens, Twitter trolls and the rest of us angry, angry folk for years. But not all platforms are on board with flipping the bird, with most keeping to the more polite high-five signs in the arsenal. Looks like Microsoft users will be the only customers able to tell each other to fuck off with a middle finger which honestly looks like an appendage meets... an apple. Figures.
The emoji isn't technically new either; according to Quartz it was added by the Unicode Consortium (the not-for-profit organisation responsible for keeping certain standards' in software, emojis included) last year. But then it's up to the individual companies behind the smartphone in your hot little hand (Apple, Google) and also social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to allow the emoji to show up. Apple and Google recently updated their emojis (with Apple especially making headlines for racially diversifying its range) but both left the bird out of it. No fun.
Via Quartz.