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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.
/s is incredibly dumb as well. “Hey look everyone, I made a joke! Aren’t I clever?”
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IIRC "smileys" were what you got from fonts like Wingdings, and I believe those were short-lived. You could type :) and MS Word or Outlook, for example, would "helpfully" give you the Wingdings happy face, which would show up as a J for anyone who didn't have that font. :-) and friends were "emoticons" for decades.
> short-lived Outlook was doing this even 3-4 years ago.
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…
If I recall correctly, it took two years for them to add cut and paste to iOS.
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.
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.