- Google CEO Sundar Pichai kicked off his keynote speech at Google’s annual developer conference, I/O, by apologizing for the flawed design of the burger emoji on Android.
- In October, a tweet sparked a conversation about the correct placement of cheese on a burger, and a lot of people felt Google had it wrong, so Pichai promised to address it immediately and delivered.
- The conference is intended to be a way for Google executives to share plans and new products and to bring viewers up to speed on the progress made since the last year’s I/O – like updates to emojis.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai showed where emoji-accuracy lies on Google’s list of priorities.
At Tuesday’s annual Google I/O conference, where developers gather to hear about upcoming products or plans and to recap progress that the tech giant has made since the last event, Pichai kicked off his keynote speech by addressing an important change in 2017.
“Towards the end of last year it came to my attention that we had a major bug in one of our core products,” he said on stage. “It turns out, we got the cheese wrong in our burger emoji.”
The burger emoji debate was sparked back in October 2017 by a tweet from author Thomas Baakdel, who pointed out the placement of the cheese on Apple’s emoji versus Google’s. Most agreed that the cheese below the burger, as was found in the Android emoji design, made less sense. The tweet went viral and Pichai responded with a good humor, tweeting that Google would “drop everything else we are doing and address on Monday.”
Pichai went on to say that, after that emoji was fixed ("I never knew so many people cared about where the cheese is," he joked), something else came to attention: The beer emoji was a half-full mug with foam coming out of the top.
"I don't even want to tell you the explanation the team gave me as to why the foam is floating above the beer, but we restored the natural laws of physics."
With the burger and beer mug fixed, Pichai went on to address matters that extended beyond the internet's interest in emoji accuracy.
"So all is well, we can get back to business. "
More highlights from Google I/O 2018:
Google Photos will soon be able to automatically add color to old black and white photos