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It’s very easy for people, especially younger people, to look at this with a 2026 understanding of the ubiquity of emoji and scoff at how ludicrous Apple was being. Things were very different. Drive-by Apple decriers will attribute anything possible to Steve Jobs’ vague “desire to control”. The reality is there were things he would obsess over and plenty he would let pass him by.
Emoji only made its way into Unicode in the 2010s. The past and present of text encoding, especially text message encoding, was/is a huge mess. I wouldn’t be running in guns blazing if I were them.
Anyone else remember the brief time in the mid 2000s that these were called "smileys" and damn near every webpage ad wanted to install a questionable IE 6 toolbar so you could "get more smileys"?
Quality kid memory for me. I also remember watching another kid click on an ad for a free ipod and then enter in his home address and other personal info.
The wikipedia entry for emoji is missing this entirely, but "smileys" were quite popular in various instant messaging apps (AOLIM, ICQ) and web forums. I was fairly sure they go back as far the mid or late 90's but I can't seem to find any hard evidence of that.
(I was into computers at the time but didn't see the point of IM apps or forums when IRC and Usenet already existed.)
https://emojistime.com/museum
If you want a trip down memory lane.
Smileys were something else (pure acid, like this :-)).
ISTR the brief time you mention calling these things emoticons.
The obsession with control I find objectionable is not their decision not to enable emoji widely until support was stable. That's an obsession with polish, not control. The commitment to polish and self-restraint to not add features until they actually work well is something I've long appreciated about Apple.
The control part is blocking third-party apps to toggle the hidden setting. If you enable unsupported features using a third-party app, the expectation of polish is obviously void. It would even be fine if Apple refused to carry apps like that in their polished, curated store, if they didn't forbid users from installing apps any other way.
The number of unicode processing bugs that existed (and maybe some still exist) alone is reason to be a bit cautious.
And having emojis work "mostly" but not "everywhere" would have been something Jobs would have entirely been against - if they wouldn't work over normal non-iMessage SMS, for example, or not work reliably.
Remember the "emojigate" issues where the same emoji would display differently on different phones and make a funny message seem threatening, etc?
Apple does tend to drag their feet a bit, though.
If I recall correctly, it took two years for them to add cut and paste to iOS.
I used emojis for a while. Every text had to have an emoji. I spent a lot of time scrolling through the emoji palette looking for the perfect emoji.
Eventually, I decided that was a complete waste of time and now I use words.
BTW, one of the things that turned me off from emojis is they looked like the stickers 2nd graders would use, along with a Playmobil look.
So Apple worked with emoji, or didn't?
Reminds me of typing "webos20090606" or "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart" into the webOS "Just Type" universal search bar, which revealed a hidden developer mode switch that allowed sideloading of apps.
The best mobile OS we ever got, years ahead of its time, doomed by circumstances.
The early (modern) smartphone days were something else
> Steven was the enterprising developer who actually discovered how to give emoji to any iPhone, all the way back in 2008.
I love how this person gets the credit, deservedly so, and the irony of the unsung people who did all the hard work of actually creating the support but with its potential nerfed.
Perhaps a rehabilitation committee can track those people down and we can give their stories and their soulless managers some well earned justice!
Throwback to the days HN had emojis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547056
Testing if it still works:
> I just tried this, sending from Verbs (iOS 5 supports emoji since forever), and yes, I can see the with no problem whatsoever :-)
I just tried this, sending from Verbs (iOS 5 supports emoji since forever), and yes, I can see the with no problem whatsoever :-)
Edit: completely swallowed!
Wow, that's comparatively very colorful. If they were kept, I wonder how HN's userbase would be different. Or how the culture would be different today. It's a different experience being able to communicate with colorful symbols. You can imply or compact a lot of words into one emoji :D
It's been so long I had almost forgotten about this... there was also at some point a 3rd party camera app which had a secret setting (activated by entering some URL into iOS Safari), enabling the use of the volume buttons to trigger the shutter. When Apple found out, they banned the app from the App Store. Not much later, the iPhone's built-in camera app got that feature which we all take for granted now.
There was a time you could enter some url into ios safari and install cydia on the iphones in the apple store. They shut that inroad down pretty quick.
I remember watching a video of a guy doing that to a display phone at an Apple Store.
While that action was definitely not a good idea, it did encapsulate just how polished that jailbreak[1] was. The UX was identical to an App Store install page of the day. You tapped the price "FREE" and then tapped "INSTALL" and the phone would appear to install Cydia as though you had just used the App Store to do it.
Cydia and jail breaking replaced hacking HP calculators for a few years for me.
I still remember the very first time I saw an emoji -- just an old-school dumb phone, and my friend sent me a message with an emoji, which the phone, amazingly, was able to display. I had no idea such a capability even existed, and wondered for a second if I was dreaming.
I'm confused as to why apps were able to edit this file.
I think I remember using one of these apps around 2010 or so, and I think it just triggered the emoji keyboard to appear somehow? And once it was opened once, the ability to use it persisted. But that was just my guess as to what was happening as a user.
I really doubt Apple's sandbox would have permitted editing a global preferences file like that. That might have just been the first, and not the only, method to enable emoji that people discovered.
Agreed
Fun fact: non-BMP Unicode emoji can't be sent in a standards-compliant SMS, which is UCS-2 (among other, even more limited, encoding options). Platforms that do let you send them are breaking the GSM spec by using UTF-16 instead, which leads to compatibility issues - for example, there were some older phones that just silently dropped messages containing emoji as malformed.
Why is this dude acting like emojis were and are some kind of indispensable communicative tool?
They are no less today than they were then something fit for kids and unserious conversations, which is why they only ever make the news when a head of state or CEO uses one when he shouldn’t have and, revealing a lack of seriousness or professionalism vis a vis whatever he’s referring to. Our lives would be no worse if they weren’t on the iPhone today.
Why didn't Apple want emoji enabled?
Probably because they weren't well supported in the West at the time and Apple didn't want people sending messages and emails from their iPhone with missing glyphs. It's one of those things you need a consensus for, both the sender and recipient have to support it. It's not something like iMessage where Apple only has to worry about their own ecosystem.
They weren't standard yet. Sending messages containing Unicode Private Use Area glyphs that not even other Apple products could display, let alone other vendors' (non-Japanese) phones, would be an interoperability nightmare.
They were in Softbank’s private use area, so no interop story really.
Sometimes when I see emoji now I look back and remember doing this on my old iPod Touch back when I was young and thinking I was so cool. It's funny to remember a time before emoji was ubiquitous when you had to go out of your way to use it.
:) I've been using emojis since the 90s... ;)
Those are emoticons ;)
Emoji originally came from Docomo phones in Japan around 1999. (Or I think those were the first ones actually called "emoji"; some other earlier devices had similar character sets.)
emoticon != emoji
Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words, with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.
Words don’t have precise meanings either.
“He has completed the task.”
versus
“He pulled it off.”
Their meanings are the same but their both have different subtext.
Emojis are simply additional levers for subtext. It’s like using a red hot colors versus cool colors for a poster — the text might be the same but the colors provide an additional way to signal subtext.
The more options, the better.
Short text communication has a way of being read as terse, rude, or with some other unintended emotion by the recipient so I think it’s a valuable way to communicate concisely but also encode the mood of the words
And yes, many things can be communicated purely on emotion and no words, which in short form is also valuable
Unquestionably enrich. Emojis and words are not mutually exclusive, communication is overall improved by allowing a richer variety of expression.
Emojis are stupid, but Japanese phone industry was weaponizing it to segregate smartphones into a niche subclass of non-serious phone-likes than actually usable phones, and so Google/Apple shoved it into Unicode to fill that moat. In hindsight, Slack style :emoji-name: notation might have done better for all, but Unicode emoji was what happened.
I believe they do. When people talk in person, there is a lot of non verbal communication that give context to their words (smiles, shrugs, side glances, etc). Even when it's just people talking over the phone, the way they pronounce words carries information (it's a lot easier to tell if someone is being sarcastic if you hear their voice, for example). So, emojis are useful for providing that missing context.
I used “decorative emojis” (some colored circles) to essentially color-code the labels in an app I don’t control that only let me provide text labels. It’s a little subjective, but I do believe it enhanced communication, from the data to the user, in that case.
Decorative emojis (the stuff AI loves to add to bullet lists) don't do much. On the other hand I'd say emojis at the start/end of a sentence are as meaningful as emoticons or /s or any other Internet shorthand for conveying intent.
Most words don't have especially precise meanings, context is everything. So emojis being imprecise is not a unique problem.
And emojis can be especially dense with information in a way that can be pretty convenient. You can scan a 96x32 pixel block of 3 emojis to quickly gather information that would have required reading 1-2 whole sentences, potentially.
Emoji are also more 'casual' in a way that can be helpful. You can tap the 'heart' emoji on a message to a colleague or friend to express your gratitude or thanks for something without having to prevaricate over exactly what language to use to avoid seeming insincere or overly affectionate.
I think they are overused and thus lose effectiveness. I don't really like them and don't use them myself but I'm not going to fight a battle over them.
They obviously make communication worse. I frequently trigger the stupid emoji keyboard by accident on my phone and every time I do I wish it wouldn't exist.
It also doesn't help that we already had perfectly acceptable emoticon systems beforehand that were better than current emojis because they were customizable.