Google Blob Emoji

Android's yellow blobs, the only emoji set that looked like nothing else, flattened into circles by Android 8.0 in 2017

Shut down
19902026

Google's blob emoji were the yellow, tapered, distinctly non-circular smileys that Android used from KitKat in 2013 through Nougat. They looked like nothing on any other platform, which made them beloved and made cross-platform messages confusing. Android 8.0 Oreo replaced the whole set with round faces on 21 August 2017. Google later brought the blobs back as sticker packs for Allo and Gboard.

Timeline [edit]

  1. 2013
  2. 31 October 2013 Launch
    Android 4.4 KitKat settles the blob shape
  3. 2016
  4. 22 August 2016 Version
    Android 7.0 Nougat, the last blob release
  5. 2017
  6. 17 May 2017 Shutdown announced
    Android O preview shows round faces
  7. 21 August 2017 Shutdown
    Android 8.0 Oreo ships without the blobs
  8. 13 September 2017 other
    Google responds to the campaign to restore them
  9. 2018
  10. May 2018 Revival
    Blobs return as sticker packs in Allo and Gboard

The site through time

Browse android.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 Full archive →

Ownership [edit]

Google 2013–2017 Founded Drawn in-house for Android

Why it shut down [edit]

Official line: Google showed a complete emoji redesign in the Android O developer preview on 17 May 2017 and shipped it in Android 8.0 Oreo on 21 August 2017. Every blob face became a circle, in line with how Apple, Samsung and Microsoft drew theirs. Google said the round faces read better at small sizes and across platforms; the blobs were not offered as an option.

Our analysis: The blobs died of interoperability. An emoji is a Unicode code point that each vendor draws for itself, so the same message can look like a friendly blob on one phone and a smirking circle on another, and by 2017 Google had decided that consistency across platforms mattered more than having a house style. That is a defensible engineering decision and it was received as a small act of vandalism, because the blobs had personality, and personality is exactly what a design system flattens. Google noticed: the blobs came back as sticker packs, which is the modern way of saying sorry.

History [edit]

Yellow, tapered, and nothing like anyone else

Android had drawn its own emoji since the beginning, and from Android 4.4 KitKat in October 2013 they settled into a shape people started calling blobs: a rounded body narrowing towards the bottom, more like a jellybean than a face, with eyes and mouths that stretched and squashed into expressions the round sets could not manage. The blob was capable of things a circle is not. Its dismay was a genuinely different shape from its embarrassment.

The problem was that emoji are not pictures, they are code points. When an Android user sent the smirking face, an iPhone user saw Apple's smirking face, and the shape, the tilt and half the tone were gone. Google's set was the outlier, so it lost the most in translation, and complaints about mismatched meaning went up as messaging moved between platforms.

Flattened

Google showed the redesign in the Android O developer preview on 17 May 2017: every emoji redrawn, the blobs replaced by circular faces with a gradient, in line with the rest of the industry. The reaction was immediate and loud, in the press and in Google's own issue tracker, where a request to bring the blobs back collected thousands of votes. Google shipped the new set anyway in Android 8.0 Oreo on 21 August 2017.

It then spent years half-apologising. Blob stickers arrived in Allo as "Long Live the Blob", then in Gboard as "The Blob Lives On"; blob variants of newer emoji keep turning up in Google products; the Noto Emoji project kept the old artwork available so anyone could put it back. On rooted phones, a module called Blobs Forever did exactly what its name says.

The domain today

The blobs are not part of Android. Their artwork survives in Google's open source emoji repositories and in sticker packs, which is the difference between a design that was removed and one that was deleted.

Similar projects

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Sources [edit]

  1. RIP blobs: Google redesigns emojis Emojipedia 18 May 2017 [archived]
  2. Android O beta introduces a new style of emoji, no more blobs 9to5Google 17 May 2017 [archived]
  3. Emojipedia now lists all the new and changed emoji in Android 8.0 Oreo Android Police 23 August 2017 [archived]
  4. Issue tracker response suggests beloved emoji could return 9to5Google 13 September 2017 [archived]
  5. Google brings back the blob emoji PhoneArena 1 May 2018 [archived]

Last verified: 18 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).