If you are suddenly seeing lots of “Aliens” in messages you are receiving or tweets on Twitter, don’t be alarmed, it’s not some conspiracy against you by extra-terrestrials, you are just bad at remembering to update your phone. The latest update is now out so your iPhone or iPad should be on iOS 8.3, or you’re Mac on OS 10.10.3.
With Apple’s latest OS software updates that were released on Tuesday 8 April, the company has released a whole bunch of new emoji characters, symbols, and other shapes. Which has caused the aliens.
Not only are there over 300 new emoji to now choose from, like country flags, or racially sensitive emoji’s, yes you can also change the skin tone of any emoji by just clicking and holding on the emoji and selecting a new colour, this is the cause of the aliens (no they didn’t add an alien race) you outdated phone doesn’t recognise these new races so replaces them with an alien. Not sure if subtle racism from Apple or coincidence…
Android phones and tablets treat the new Apple emoji’s differently too. These emoji’s on an Android phone can be replaced with completely different images.
Of course as more and more update their software on their Apple devices the rather disturbing alien faces will no doubt disappear, but for the time being don’t panic and update.