Scotland's smartphone users can now express national pride with a single keystroke as the saltire flag emoji is confirmed for release.

A symbol showing the blue and white flag will soon be available on smartphones and social media, it was announced on Thursday.

Mark Davis, the president of Unicode, posted online that the company agreed to add the saltire, along with the flags of England and Wales to its system.

Despite a clamour on social media to introduce a tiny Scottish flag to standard emoji keyboards in 2015, the emblem did not materialise as part of the Unicode Foundation collection of symbols.

The news even prompted former First Minister Alex Salmond to publicly back the introduction of one.

The UK flag is already available on most iPhone and Android devices.

Mr Davis, who co-founded the company, tweeted: "We just agreed to add three UK flags to Unicode."

In the same tweet, he shared images of what the new emoji symbols will look like when they come into use.

They are due to become available to the public later this year.

Jeremy Burge, chief emoji officer at Emojipedia, and Owen Williams, who works for BBC Wales, proposed the flags be given Unicode support last year.

Writing on his blog on Friday, Mr Burge confirmed the proposal had been approved.

He said: "Previously, flags of the UK home nations haven't been eligible for emoji status as the relevant ISO standard lists the United Kingdom as one single entity.

"Now that subdivisions are supported, thousands of new flags are technically possible - with these being the first three approved."

Mr Burge also confirmed the Scotland flag has the highest demand from social media and smartphone users when looking for emojis.

He said users are likely to start being able to use the flags in the second half of this year.