Responding to a query from MTV Act, Apple has mentioned that it is working to bring more diverse emojis to iOS. These icons have gone through criticism in the past for only featuring Caucasian characters, so it’s good to see that Apple is in the process of making a change. However, Apple hasn’t specified when these changes will come to effect and has merely mentioned that it’s on the cards.

The email from Apple’s VP of Worldwide Corporate Communications, Katie Cotton read the following:

“Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.”

Emojis were last updated with iOS 6, so it is possible that Apple could be bringing in these changes in iOS 8. Prior to that users had a use a hack to enable emoji icons, but this icon set has come a long way since then.