It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
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It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
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Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
#2Why didn't Apple want emoji enabled?
Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
#3It’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.
Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
#4:) I've been using emojis since the 90s... ;)
Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
#5:) I've been using emojis since the 90s... ;)
emoticon != emoji
Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
#6:) 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.)
Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
#7It'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.
Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
#8Why 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.
Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
#9:) I've been using emojis since the 90s... ;)
emoticon != emoji
=^o_o^=
^_^
Ah the halcyon days of feelin' pompous for using random squigglies to convey emotion.
Still remember being scandalized by the flip table emoticon using characters I couldn't find on my keyboard. So jealous I had to ...
(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻
well, not that actually. just paste, I guess.
Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
#10It’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…
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?