Apple wants to bring diversity even in the emoji Cartoon characters which are used in text messaging. The current emoji hav received claims that they have been bias, in that the characters have been either Caucasian or a few Asian characters, with no representation of black or other ethic groups.
The emjois were standardized for the for first time in 2010, when the Unicode Consortium, which already manages computer fonts took on the task of ensuring cross-device compatibility.
Any company can create emojis and Apple could roll out a wider selection, but to ensure that non-Apple devices can display them, it needs the standards body to approve the designs.