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Did Google just use an iPhone to announce Android Nougat?

Google has announced the official name for its next major Android version: Nougat. But it looks like Google announced it on Snapchat using an iPhone.
By
July 1, 2016
Google Snapchat Android Nougat reveal iOS emoji

For those of you that caught Google’s reveal of Android Nougat on Snapchat yesterday, you might have noticed something a little…odd. In one part of the Snapchat story, a smiling emoji is placed over a woman’s face as she sits on the Nougat statue at the Googleplex. That’s all well and good, the only thing is that it’s an iOS emoji, not Android. So did Google just use an iPhone to announce Android Nougat?

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First of all, here’s the evidence. You can clearly see the emoji in the image above, screen grabbed from Snapchat by our eagle-eyed tipster Harrison W. If you take a look at the standard list of iOS emoji here you can see that it’s definitely the same smiley. But what if that’s just the default smiley emoji in Snapchat, I hear you ask? Well, as you can see in the image below, the Android Snapchat emoji (on the right) are definitely different.

iOS emoji vs Android emoji

Before everyone starts freaking out and saying Google has sold out to Apple or whatever, keep in mind that it’s not like that Snapchat story got shared from the phone of Alphabet’s Chairman or anything. Oh wait, Eric Schmidt uses an iPhone too. But in all seriousness, that Snapchat story would have been pushed out by some random PR person at Google. Maybe a social media intern. Or Eric Schmidt.

Either way, it doesn’t really matter what phone they used, but it is a little bit funny. Of course, you can substitute emoji in Snapchat, but why would a Googler specifically choose iOS emoji for an Android launch? However it came about, Android history is actually littered with funny episodes like this. You might remember Eric Schmidt was the one caught in the wild with the original Moto X, back when it was a closely guarded secret.

Then the Nexus 5 got leaked in the KitKat unveiling video. We also had the retroactive realization that the silhouette of the Nexus 5 had been in the Android 4.3 camera app for months (it was arguably the icon for switching to the front-facing camera). Then we have the yearly merry-go-round of Android name guessing based on notoriously incorrect internal codenames. Remember how sure we all were about Android Key Lime Pie?

Did you catch this? What’s your favorite leak or accidental mixup in Android history?