Gboard Now Rolling Out Redesigned Hand Emoji

As the go-to digital keyboard for Android, Gboard often sees a big change. The latest such update is more expressive hand gesture emoji on Gboard.

Google’s approach to emojis has been more fun than the bubbly, almost plastic look that Apple has adopted on iOS. This is most prominent with the little circular faces with cutesy facial expressions, but while they remain pretty much unchanged, some tweaks are made to other commonly used hand emoji as part of the wider Noto updates prepared for Android 16.

If you have updated to the recent Android 15 QPR2 Beta 3 release, you might spot this right away. As expected, Google altered the designs to make hand gesture emojis more expressive and clearer to read. What’s more, while this was expected to arrive with the next OS upgrade, the changes appear to be rolling out to those not running the preview software. This change also appears to be present on devices already running the Android 16 Developer Preview and was spotted by eagle-eyed reader Richard.

The outlines and shadows of each hand gesture now have greater prominence, while some fingers have been redesigned to make it easier to distinguish each specific emoji, it does mean that Gboard has ditched some of the cartoon-like qualities that we have come to know and love.

For instance, the “pinch” gesture has more anatomically correct knuckles with a more clasped hand. The end result is that it’s easier to work out what you’re using and what these icons mean, and therefore, they better convey the message you’ve sent – or received.

At the moment, the updated hand emoji don’t appear to have altered any creations you may have tinkered with on Gboard’s excellent emoji kitchen, but that could change as the upgraded images roll out more widely.