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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

#31

Post by tomashubelbauer »

threetonesun wrote: post #24
esafak wrote: post #15

Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words, with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.

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.

Decorative emojis in headings and lists help me skim documents faster than I'd otherwise be able to.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#32

Post by seba_dos1 »

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.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#33

Post by mock-possum »

esafak wrote: post #15

Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words, with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.

Unquestionably enrich. Emojis and words are not mutually exclusive, communication is overall improved by allowing a richer variety of expression.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#34

Post by numpad0 »

esafak wrote: post #15

Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words, with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.

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.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#35

Post by mikkupikku »

bombcar wrote: post #10
UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #3

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…

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 phon…

I thought it was weird when they made the gun emoji look like a toy.. to make threats seem funny? Or some sort of Sapir-Whorf thing? I don't know, it never made sense.

Re: It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

#40

Post by nancyminusone »

UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote: post #3

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…

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.

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