New Emoji iOs 8.3 Update Features Racially Diverse Keyboard For Apple iPhone

For those who'd been clamoring for Apple to make its emoji princesses, babies and hand-holding couples more racially diverse, the iOs 8.3 update that came out Wednesday includes that option.

Users can now tap and hold on to humanoid emojis to change them, with 300 new ones to choose from, reports the Next Web. The update also includes new languages for Siri, including Russian, Danish, Dutch, Thai, Swedish, Turkish and Portuguese.

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The call for Apple to diversify emojis peaked in March of 2014. "There are at least 30 emojis that depict white people," wrote BetaBeat, "but there's nary a black person to be found. There's one apparently Asian man, plus a darker-skinned guy in a turban."

MTV had asked Apple why emojis were mostly white, and Katie Cotton, who at the time was VP of worldwide corporate communications, agreed there was a need to diversify. "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."

But not everyone is happy with the emojis, with Mac Daily News reporting that some Asian emoji-users particularly in China, find the yellow-hued figures offensive. Some, like Jade Tran, went to Twitter to complain: "Is the yellow emoji suppose to represent Asians because I have never in my life seen an Asian lookin like that,” she wrote in a tweet.