> In the future, it may well be updated to show the green, white, and black flag of the Syrian opposition to Assad's regime (often called the Syrian National Coalition).

My understanding is that the appearance of any given glyph in any given font is up to the font designer, and not at all dictated by the Unicode Consortium.

My understanding is that the selection of font is up to the interface designer, and not at all dictated by the designer of the font.

Sure. But regardless there are several such interfaces, each at least in theory making independent decisions. So it makes no sense to speak of an "update" to the emoji as if it were anything centralized, or when that would happen.

The article seems to cover this, but the question isn't well posed and I would have thought it better to address that more head-on in the article.

Last I checked, nobody has even updated Afghanistan's flag yet.