Less than a week after Apple pledged to make its emoticons more racially diverse, African telecom Oju has stepped into the fray with an app that lets you send emoticons of color.

The Android app includes the gamut of basic emotions, including happy, surprised, sad, really sad and embarrassed. A test of the app shows it doesn't really work like an emoticon, though. Instead, it merely sends an MMS of a pic of one of the emotions, which includes a plug for Oju's website.

Still, it's a step in the right direction.

Last week, Apple vowed to diversify its mostly white emoticons after Miley Cyrus and actor Tahj Mowry complained. Picking up on the grievance, MTV Act blogger Joey Parker emailed Apple CEO Tim Cook. Parker got the following reply from Apple rep Katie Cotton:

Tim forwarded your email to me. We agree with you. Our emoji characters are based on the Unicode standard, which is necessary for them to be displayed properly across many platforms. There needs to be more diversity in the emoji character set, and we have been working closely with the Unicode Consortium in an effort to update the standard.

Meanwhile, Google has no such issues on Android: Its emoticons are all green.

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