So a lot of people were less than enthused by the weird yellow skin emoji that Apple recently unveiled. Johnny Lin, an ex-Apple engineer, was pretty disappointed and decided to do something about it. He created an app called Memoji Keyboard -- a better, more personalized way to send emojis.
Instead of pre-defined (and rather unsightly) skin colors, you use your own skin. In fact, it's your own face, emotions and expressions. The Memoji Keyboard allows you to create and send custom animated emojis of yourself doing the smiley face, sad face, thumbs up, and other emoji classics.
This is like next level emoji. "We have more bandwidth, better screens, faster phones. We should leverage those advances to send more personal emoji of our true selves, instead of hiding behind a fugly yellow circle," Johnny says. Plus, "It's a great way to unleash the actor in all of us."
Here's some more info about the app, which was just approved by Apple and is available on iTunes:
With Memoji Keyboard, send animated emojis of yourself to the people unfortunate enough to be your friends and family.
You'll have a blast recreating classic emojis such as 😜, 😎, and of course, 😀.
Then, prepare to pick up the bits of brain scattered about the room as you literally blow peoples' minds by texting them animated emojis of your face.
They'll ask, "how did you do that?!" but don't tell them.
Just send them your perfectly pre-posed shrug memoji ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and go grill up a delicious steak.
Memoji keyboard even comes with all the regular emojis, so you can still keep it casual with people who aren't ready for the intensity of your Blue Steel memoji (yet).
As Friedrich Nietzsche once said, "Emoji is dead."
And he's right, because something much better has come along.
It's your face.
In animated GIF form.
In a keyboard.
The app works best on iPhone using iMessage. I've had the pleasure of trying out the Memoji Keyboard for the last week, and it's been a lot of fun. I find myself trying to find excuses to send silly animated gifs of myself giving the thumbs up or grinning wildly. It's been particularly fun for group messaging.
Memoji Keyboard is currently a free app download, which gives you five free memojis to set. Then it's $1.99 to unlock all the Memojis forever. Personally, I think the unlock is totally worth it.
To learn more about Memoji Keyboard, check out the website, and download the app from iTunes.