WEST HOLLYWOOD, CALIF. —As with most else in our culture, demographics define the future, particularly those describing an age cohort born with a smartphone in hand. That, at least, is the calculation being made by Grindr, the successful gay meeting app with ambitions to overhaul itself as an Internet commons for a generation of young lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people and their pals.

And so, starting this week, Grindr will offer to users a set of trademarked emoji, called Gaymoji — 500 icons that function as visual shorthand for terms and acts and states of being that seem funnier, breezier and less freighted with complication when rendered in cartoon form in place of words.

“Almost 20 per cent of all Grindr messages” already use emoji, its creative director, Landis Smithers, said. “There’s this shift going on culturally and we need to follow the users where they’re taking us.”

That is, toward a visual language of rainbow unicorns, bears, otters and handcuffs — to cite some of the images available in the first set of 100 free Gaymoji symbols. An additional 400 are there for the unlocking by those willing to pay $3.99 to own digital icons arranged in categories like Mood, Objects, Body, and Dating and Sex.

The company’s founder, Joel Simkhai, said that in his own communications on Grindr he had often felt the need for emoji that were not previously available.

“Partly, this project started because the current set of emojis set by some international board were limited and not evolving fast enough for us,” said Simkhai.

“If I wanted to say something about going dancing, I would always have to use the red-dress dancing woman. I thought, ‘Why isn’t there a guy dancing?’ It was weird to me that I always had to send that woman in the red dress.”

Studies commissioned by Grindr have shown that whether they are lured by the prospect of sexual encounters, or coffee dates or the constantly refreshed cascade of neck-to-knee photos, the 3 million daily users have been logging on to the site an average of 18 times a day and spending a total there of almost one hour out of every 24.

A stark change from the quarters Grindr formerly occupied in an anonymous building on a dreary stretch of Sunset Boulevard, the company’s news offices in West Hollywood occupy a glass-walled floor, with stereoscopic vistas of the Los Angeles area visible from every desk.

Yet few of the 90 employees in the offices seemed to take much note of the brilliant azure skies. Like most every other human in the developed world, they had their heads buried in their screens.

“We’re all so attached to our phones that when people talk about the notion of the computer melding with the human and ask when that’s going to happen, I say it already has,” Simkhai said. He added that the prospect of being deprived of a phone for 20 minutes induced in him “the highest level of anxiety I can possibly have.”

That much-analyzed compulsion, with its origins in the brain’s pleasure receptors, seemed tailor-made for Grindr’s expansion into emoji.