Like, why are all the faces facing forward now? The different perspectives with the old emoji made it more three-dimensional. Everything being the same now is just boring. (Also, the neutral face emoji doesn’t look stoned anymore.)
Also, the people actually look like people now instead of blobs, which kind of sucks since it adheres to the debunked gender binary, but I’m not gonna talk about that here.
I’m pretty sure Android did this to have their emoji look more like Apple’s, which is a bad idea since Apple’s idea of what emoji should look like isn’t really an end-all be-all specification. More on that here: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/04/12/apple-did-not-invent-emoji/