The implementation of emojis on different platforms took place across a three-decade period, starting in the 1990s. Today, the exact appearance of
emoji
An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversat ...
is not prescribed but can vary between fonts and platforms, much like different
typeface
A typeface (or font family) is the design of lettering that can include variations in size, weight (e.g. bold), slope (e.g. italic), width (e.g. condensed), and so on. Each of these variations of the typeface is a font.
There are list of type ...
s.
For example, the
Apple Color Emoji
Apple Color Emoji (stylized as AppleColorEmoji) is a color typeface used on Apple platforms such as iOS and macOS to display Emoji characters.
The inclusion of emoji in the iPhone and in the Unicode standard has been credited with promoting th ...
typeface is proprietary to Apple, and can only be used on Apple devices (without additional
hacking). Different computing companies have developed their own fonts to display emoji, some of which have been
open-sourced to permit their reuse. Both color and monochrome emoji typefaces exist, as well as at least one animated design.
Technical aspects
JIS, Shift JIS and Private Use Area encodings
Various, often incompatible, character encoding schemes were developed by the different mobile providers in Japan for their own emoji sets. When transmitted in
Shift JIS
Shift JIS (Shift Japanese Industrial Standards, also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by a Japanese company called ASCII Corporation in conjunctio ...
on NTT DoCoMo, emoji symbols are specified as a two-
byte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable unit ...
sequence in the range F89F through F9FC (as expressed in
hexadecimal
In mathematics and computing, the hexadecimal (also base-16 or simply hex) numeral system is a positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of 16. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using 10 symbols, hexa ...
). Emoji pictograms on au by KDDI are specified using the
IMG tag, encoded in Shift JIS between F340 and F7FC,
or encoded in extended
JIS X 0208
JIS X 0208 is a 2-byte character set specified as a Japanese Industrial Standards, Japanese Industrial Standard, containing 6879 graphic characters suitable for writing text, place names, personal names, and so forth in the Japanese language. Th ...
between 7521 and 7B73.
SoftBank Mobile emoji support colors and animation, and use different formats on 2G versus 3G:
in the 2G format, they are encoded in sequences using the and control characters, whereas in the 3G format, they are encoded in Shift JIS between F741 and FBDE.
The SoftBank 3G format collides with the overlapping Shift JIS ranges used by the other vendors: for example, the Shift JIS representation F797 is used for a
convenience store
A convenience store, convenience shop, corner store or corner shop is a small retail business that stocks a range of everyday items such as coffee, groceries, snack foods, confectionery, soft drinks, ice creams, tobacco products, lottery ticket ...
(🏪) by SoftBank, but for a
wristwatch
A watch is a portable timepiece intended to be carried or worn by a person. It is designed to keep a consistent movement despite the motions caused by the person's activities. A wristwatch is designed to be worn around the wrist, attached by ...
(⌚️) by KDDI.
DoCoMo
and SoftBank also developed their own schemes for representing their emoji sets in extended JIS X 0208 between 7522 and 7E38. These often matched the encodings of similar KDDI emoji where they existed: for example, the camera (📷) was represented in Shift JIS as F8E2 by DoCoMo, F6EE by KDDI, and F948 by SoftBank, but as 7670 in JIS by all three.
All three vendors and
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
(for
GMail
Gmail is a free email service provided by Google. As of 2019, it had 1.5 billion active users worldwide. A user typically accesses Gmail in a web browser or the official mobile app. Google also supports the use of email clients via the POP an ...
) each developed at least one scheme for encoding their emoji in the Unicode
Private Use Area
In Unicode, a Private Use Area (PUA) is a range of code points that, by definition, will not be assigned characters by the Unicode Consortium. Three private use areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearl ...
(with au developing two);
DoCoMo, for example, used the range U+E63E through U+E757.
Mostly, these five schemes do not overlap, but au's primary private use scheme partly collides with SoftBank's.
Versions of
iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
prior to 5.1 encoded emoji in the SoftBank private use area scheme, with later versions using standard Unicode.
Supplementary Multilingual Plane support
Most, but not all, emoji are included in the
Supplementary Multilingual Plane
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal ...
(SMP) of Unicode. The SMP also includes, for example, ancient scripts such as
Cuneiform
Cuneiform is a logo-syllabic script that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Middle East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. It is named for the characteristic wedge-sha ...
or
Egyptian hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs (, ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt, used for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with some 1,000 distinct characters.There were about 1,00 ...
, some modern scripts such as
Adlam or
Osage, and special-use characters such as
Musical Symbols
Musical symbols are marks and symbols in musical notation that indicate various aspects of how a piece of music is to be performed. There are symbols to communicate information about many musical elements, including Pitch (music), pitch, Duration ...
or
Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols
Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols is a Unicode block comprising styled forms of Latin alphabet, Latin and Greek alphabet, Greek letters and decimal numerical digit, digits that enable mathematicians to denote different notions with different ...
.
Unicode was originally designed as a 16-bit encoding, which could be represented in a pure 16-bit form known as
UCS-2
The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646, ''Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS)'' (plus amendments to that standard), whi ...
. This corresponds to the
Basic Multilingual Plane
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecima ...
(BMP) of the
Universal Coded Character Set
The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of character (computing), characters defined by the international standard International Organization for Standardization, ISO/International Electrotechnical Commission, IEC  ...
. In Unicode 2.0, this was expanded to 17 planes (numbered 0 through 16, where the BMP is plane 0), and the first non-BMP characters were allocated in Unicode 3.1.
UCS-2 is now obsolete and
deprecated
In several fields, especially computing, deprecation is the discouragement of use of some terminology, feature, design, or practice, typically because it has been superseded or is no longer considered efficient or safe, without completely removing ...
in favour of
UTF-16
UTF-16 (16-bit computing, 16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode (in fact this number of code points is dictated by the design of UTF-16). The encoding is variab ...
, a variable-width encoding which follows UCS-2 for the BMP, but extends it with four-byte codes representing non-BMP characters. Non-BMP characters (in the SMP and in other supplementary planes, such as additional
hanzi in the
Supplementary Ideographic Plane
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecima ...
, including some of the
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding are ...
characters from
HKSCS
The Hong Kong Supplementary Character Set (; commonly abbreviated to HKSCS) is a set of Chinese characters – 4,702 in total in the initial release—used in Cantonese, as well as when writing the names of some places in Hong Kong (whether in w ...
) now number in the tens of thousands.
Some systems introduced prior to the advent of Unicode emoji were only designed to support characters in the BMP, on the assumption that non-BMP characters would rarely be encountered,
although failure to properly handle characters outside of the BMP precludes Unicode compliance.
For example, earlier versions of
MySQL
MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...
supported
UCS-2
The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646, ''Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS)'' (plus amendments to that standard), whi ...
and a variant of
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a variable-width encoding, variable-length character encoding used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode'' (or ''Universal Coded Character Set'') ''Transformation Format 8-bit'' ...
excluding four-byte codes, thus not handling non-BMP characters correctly. Support for
UTF-32
UTF-32 (32- bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a fixed-length encoding used to encode Unicode code points that uses exactly 32 bits (four bytes) per code point (but a number of leading bits must be zero as there are far fewer than 232 Unicode ...
and full support for
UTF-16
UTF-16 (16-bit computing, 16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding capable of encoding all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode (in fact this number of code points is dictated by the design of UTF-16). The encoding is variab ...
and UTF-8 (under the name ) was added in version 5.5, with retained as an alias for the up-to-three-byte version, although this is intended to be changed in the future.
The introduction of Unicode emoji created an incentive for vendors to improve their support for non-BMP characters.
The Unicode Consortium notes that "
cause of the demand for emoji, many implementations have upgraded their Unicode support substantially."
Font format support
Any operating system that supports adding additional fonts to the system can add an emoji-supporting font. However, inclusion of colorful emoji in existing font formats requires dedicated support for color
glyphs
A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
. Not all operating systems have support for color fonts, so in these cases emoji might have to be rendered as black-and-white line art or not at all. There are four different formats used for multi-color glyphs in an
SFNT
SFNT is a font file format which can contain other fonts, such as PostScript, TrueType, OpenType, Web Open Font Format (WOFF) fonts and other. SFNT stands for '' spline font'' or ''scalable font'', and was originally developed for TrueType fonts o ...
font.
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...
version 1.8 standardizes all four.
*
is a multi-color
raster
Raster may refer to:
* Raster graphics, graphical techniques using arrays of pixel values
* Raster graphics editor, a computer program
* Raster scan, the pattern of image readout, transmission, storage, and reconstruction in television and compu ...
format, using raw bitmap data or embedded
PNG data.
It requires an auxiliary table to hold details about the image format,
and as such the format is sometimes called "CBDT/CBLC".
*
is a multi-color
vector
Vector most often refers to:
*Euclidean vector, a quantity with a magnitude and a direction
*Vector (epidemiology), an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism
Vector may also refer to:
Mathematic ...
format, using multiple single-color
OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark ...
(
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating sy ...
or
CFF) glyphs. A number of glyphs are assigned individual block colors and layered, and associated with a specified single-color base glyph. The layered glyphs are shown instead of the base glyph when the character is displayed as multi-color.
Colors are referenced from a palette, which is defined in a separate table,
and as such the format is sometimes called "COLR/CPAL".
* is a multi-color raster format, using embedded
JPEG
JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...
, PNG or
TIFF
Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word processin ...
images. Including multi-color raster or vector glyphs as embedded
PDF
Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
files is also permitted by the
Apple Advanced Typography
Apple Advanced Typography (AAT) is Apple Inc.'s computer technology for advanced font rendering, supporting internationalization and complex features for typographers, a successor to Apple's little-used QuickDraw GX font technology of the mid-1 ...
specification, but not by the OpenType specification, and is planned for future releases of
iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
and
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
.
* SVG-in-OpenType (or OpenType-SVG) is a multi-color vector format (with support for embedded rasters),
using embedded
SVG images. It requires the inclusion of a single-color TrueType or CFF glyph as well, serving as a fallback.
Being based on SVG, it includes support for
color gradient
In color science, a color gradient specifies a range of position-dependent colors, usually used to fill a region.
Name
A color gradient is also known as a color ramp or a color progression. In assigning colors to a set of values, a gradien ...
s.
An OpenType-SVG font may use a palette, similarly to ; however, this is not required.
The format was introduced by Microsoft, with
Windows 8.1
Windows 8.1 is a release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 27, 2013, and broadly released for retail sale on October 17, 2013, about a year after the retail release of its pre ...
.
The format was introduced by
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
and is supported on
Android, while the competing format was introduced by
Apple
An apple is an edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus domestica''). Apple fruit tree, trees are agriculture, cultivated worldwide and are the most widely grown species in the genus ''Malus''. The tree originated in Central Asia, wh ...
, and is supported on
macOS
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
and
iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
. SVG-in-OpenType was designed by
Mozilla
Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...
and
Adobe
Adobe ( ; ) is a building material made from earth and organic materials. is Spanish for ''mudbrick''. In some English-speaking regions of Spanish heritage, such as the Southwestern United States, the term is used to refer to any kind of e ...
as an industry standard.
Some support for SVG-in-OpenType support has been added to newer updates of
Windows 10
Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
, and to newer versions of iOS and macOS.
DirectWrite DirectWrite is a text layout and glyph rendering API by Microsoft. It was designed to replace GDI/GDI+ and Uniscribe for screen-oriented rendering and was first shipped with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as Windows Vista and Win ...
has supported all four since Windows 10 Anniversary Update; however, Windows only supports a subset of SVG-in-OpenType.
On the web, SVG-in-OpenType is supported by recent versions of
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
,
Safari
A safari (; ) is an overland journey to observe wild animals, especially in eastern or southern Africa. The so-called "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, leopard, rhinoceros, elephant, and Cape buffalo – particularly form an importa ...
and
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge is a proprietary, cross-platform web browser created by Microsoft. It was first released in 2015 as part of Windows 10 and Xbox One and later ported to other platforms as a fork of Google's Chromium open-source project: Android ...
, but not by
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...
; Edge and Safari additionally support , while Edge and Chrome support and all four support .
This means that color fonts may need to be supplied in several formats to be usable on multiple operating systems, or in multiple applications.
Internationalized domain names
A limited number of
top-level domain
A top-level domain (TLD) is one of the domains at the highest level in the hierarchical Domain Name System of the Internet after the root domain. The top-level domain names are installed in the root zone of the name space. For all domains in ...
s allow registration of domain names containing emoji characters. Emoji-containing subdomains are also possible under any top-level domain.
Implementation by different platforms
Google ( and )
Google's
Noto fonts
Noto is a font family comprising over 100 individual fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. , Noto fonts cover all 93 scripts defined in Unicode version 6.1 (April 2012), although fewer than ...
project includes the Noto Color Emoji font, which supplies color glyphs for emoji characters.
ChromeOS
ChromeOS, sometimes stylized as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interfac ...
, through its inclusion of the Noto fonts, supports the emoji set introduced through Unicode 6.2. As of ChromeOS 41, Noto Color Emoji is the default font for most emoji.
Android devices support emoji differently depending on the operating system version. Google added native emoji support to Android in July 2013 with Android 4.3,
and to the Google Keyboard in November 2013 for devices running Android 4.4 and later. Android 7.0 Nougat added Unicode 9 emoji, skin tone modifiers, and a redesign of many existing emoji.
Emoji are also supported by the
Google Hangouts
Google Hangouts is a discontinued cross-platform instant messaging service developed by Google. It originally was a feature of Google+, becoming a standalone product in 2013, when Google also began integrating features from Google+ Messenger an ...
application (independent of the keyboard in use), in both Hangouts and
SMS
Short Message/Messaging Service, commonly abbreviated as SMS, is a text messaging service component of most telephone, Internet and mobile device systems. It uses standardized communication protocols that let mobile devices exchange short text ...
modes. Several third-party messaging and keyboard applications (such as IQQI Keyboard) for Android devices provide plugins that allow the use of emoji. With Android 8 (Oreo), Google added a compatibility library that, if included by app developers, makes the latest Noto emoji available on any platform since Android 4.3.
Stock Android systems include the Noto glyphs for emoji characters, although individual social media apps may use their own glyphs instead. However, mobile phone vendors HTC and LG deployed variants of NotoColorEmoji.ttf with custom glyphs prior to 2017, and Samsung still does. Some Japanese mobile carriers used to equip branded Android devices with emoji glyphs that were closer to the original ones, but apparently have stopped updating these circa 2015.
Apple
Apple first introduced emoji to their desktop operating system with the release of
OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
10.7 Lion, in 2011. Users can view emoji characters sent through email and messaging applications, which are commonly shared by mobile users, as well as any other application. Users can create emoji symbols using the "Characters" special input panel from almost any native application by selecting the "Edit" menu and pulling down to "Special Characters", or by the key combination . Users can also create these symbols by switching the keyboard to Unicode, holding and typing the Unicode hex input. For example, holding down would create ☺. The desktop OS uses the
Apple Color Emoji
Apple Color Emoji (stylized as AppleColorEmoji) is a color typeface used on Apple platforms such as iOS and macOS to display Emoji characters.
The inclusion of emoji in the iPhone and in the Unicode standard has been credited with promoting th ...
font that was introduced earlier in
iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
. This provides users with full color pictographs.
The emoji keyboard was first available in Japan with the release of
iPhone OS version 2.2 in 2008. The emoji keyboard was not officially made available outside of Japan until
iOS version 5.0. From iPhone OS 2.2 through to iOS 4.3.5 (2011), those outside Japan could access the keyboard but had to use a third party app to enable it. The first of such apps was developed by
Josh Gare
Josh Gare (born 20 September 1992) is an English computer programmer and internet entrepreneur. He is best known for facilitating the Emoji keyboard outside of Japan on iOS, which is a keyboard that can be used to send messages with emoticon ...
; emoji beginning to be embraced by popular culture outside Japan has been attributed to these apps. iOS was updated to support
Fitzpatrick skin-tone modifiers with version 8.3.
OS X 10.9 Mavericks introduced a dedicated emoji input palette in most text input boxes within the Mac's existing Character Viewer using the key combination . Optionally, the key alone can be specified by the user in the keyboard preferences menu to bring up the Character Viewer. Since
macOS Big Sur
macOS Big Sur (version 11) is the seventeenth major release of macOS, Apple Inc.'s operating system for Macintosh computers. It was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 22, 2020, and was released to the public ...
, the key is also labeled as (globe) for consistency across macOS and
iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
, which uses the globe key as a function key to switch to the emoji and other chosen international keyboard layouts.
Apple has revealed that the "face with tears of joy" is the most popular emoji among English speaking Americans. On second place is the "heart" emoji followed by the "Loudly Crying Face".
On July 17, 2018, for the
World Emoji Day
World Emoji Day is an annual unofficial holiday occurring on 17 July, intended to celebrate emoji; in the years since the earliest observance, it has become a popular date to make product or other announcements and releases relating to emoji.
...
, Apple announced that it will be adding 70 more emoji in its 2018
iOS
iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...
update, including the long-awaited, red hair, white hair, curly hair and bald emoji.
On September 12, 2017, Apple announced that the
Messages app on the
iPhones with
Face ID
Face ID is a facial recognition system designed and developed by Apple Inc. for the iPhone and iPad Pro. The system allows biometric authentication for unlocking a device, making payments, accessing sensitive data, providing detailed facial ex ...
would get "Animoji", which are versions of standard emoji that are custom-animated with the use of
facial motion capture
Facial motion capture is the process of electronically converting the movements of a person's face into a digital database using cameras or laser scanners. This database may then be used to produce computer graphics (CG), computer animation for mo ...
to reflect the sender's expressions. These Animoji can also utilize
lip sync
Lip sync or lip synch (pronounced , the same as the word ''sink'', short for lip synchronization) is a technical term for matching a speaking or singing person's lip movements with sung or spoken vocals.
Audio for lip syncing is generated thr ...
to appear to speak audio messages recorded by the sender. Apple had created 3D models of all standard emoji prior to its late-2016 OS updates from which the static default 2D graphics had been rendered. A select set of these models are being reused for creating still images and short animations dynamically.
With the release of
iOS 13
iOS 13 is the thirteenth major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. for their iPhone, iPod Touch, and HomePod lines. The successor to iOS 12 on those devices, it was announced at the company's Worldwide Developer ...
, Apple introduced "Memoji" that allows the use of an avatar that a user can use to personalize messages; this feature does not require Face ID.
Linux
Ubuntu 18.04
Ubuntu releases are made semiannually by Canonical (company), Canonical Ltd, the developers of the Ubuntu operating system, using the year and month of the release as a Software versioning, version number. The first Ubuntu release, for example, ...
and
Fedora
A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both sides ...
28 support color emoji by default, using
Noto Color Emoji. Some
Linux distribution
A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...
s require the installation of extra fonts. Color emoji are supported by
FreeType and
Cairo
Cairo ( ; ar, القاهرة, al-Qāhirah, ) is the capital of Egypt and its largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metro ...
.
Microsoft Windows
An update for
Windows 7
Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...
and Windows Server 2008 R2 brought a subset of the monochrome Unicode set to those operating systems as part of the ''Segoe UI Symbol'' font.
As of
Windows 8.1
Windows 8.1 is a release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on August 27, 2013, and broadly released for retail sale on October 17, 2013, about a year after the retail release of its pre ...
Preview, the ''Segoe UI Emoji'' font is included, which supplies full-color pictographs. The plain Segoe UI font lacks emoji characters, whereas Segoe UI Symbol and Segoe UI Emoji include them.
Emoji characters are accessed through the onscreen keyboard's key, or through the physical keyboard shortcut .
Differently from macOS and iOS, color glyphs are only supplied when the application supports Microsoft's
DirectWrite DirectWrite is a text layout and glyph rendering API by Microsoft. It was designed to replace GDI/GDI+ and Uniscribe for screen-oriented rendering and was first shipped with Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2, as well as Windows Vista and Win ...
API, and Segoe UI Emoji is explicitly declared, otherwise monochrome glyphs appear. Microsoft's COLR/CPAL format for multi-color fonts such as Segoe UI Emoji is supported by the current versions of several web browsers on Windows (including
Firefox
Mozilla Firefox, or simply Firefox, is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. It uses the Gecko rendering engine to display web pages, which implements current and ...
,
Google Chrome
Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser developed by Google. It was first released in 2008 for Microsoft Windows, built with free software components from Apple WebKit and Mozilla Firefox. Versions were later released for Linux, macOS ...
,
Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated IE or MSIE) is a series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft which was used in the Microsoft Wind ...
and
Microsoft Edge
Microsoft Edge is a proprietary, cross-platform web browser created by Microsoft. It was first released in 2015 as part of Windows 10 and Xbox One and later ported to other platforms as a fork of Google's Chromium open-source project: Android ...
), but not by many graphics applications.
Windows 10 Anniversary Update added Unicode 9 emoji.
In August 2022, Microsoft open sourced more than 1,500 of its 3D
emoji
An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from typed conversat ...
to let creators remix and customize them. The library is available on
Figma and
GitHub
GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...
.
Social media platforms
Facebook
Facebook is an online social media and social networking service owned by American company Meta Platforms. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with fellow Harvard College students and roommates Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin M ...
and
Twitter
Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...
replace all Unicode emoji used on their websites with their own custom graphics.
Prior to October 2017, Facebook had different sets for the main site and for its
Messenger
''MESSENGER'' was a NASA robotic space probe that orbited the planet Mercury between 2011 and 2015, studying Mercury's chemical composition, geology, and magnetic field. The name is a backronym for "Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geoche ...
service, where only the former provides complete coverage. Messenger now uses Apple emoji on iOS, and the main Facebook set elsewhere.
Facebook reactions are only partially compatible with standard emoji.
Twitter has released Twemoji, which is their emoji graphics together with a JavaScript library to handle them, under the
Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license and the
MIT open-source license, respectively. Despite this, the Android and iOS Twitter apps use the emoji graphics that are native to the platform they are running on (Apple and Google), instead of the Twemoji graphics.
Other emoji font vendors
![Emojione 1F3AB](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Emojione_1F3AB.svg)
EmojiOne version 2.2, an open-source font available under a
free content license, supports the full emoji set in color through Unicode Emoji 3.0, i.e. Unicode 9.0. Newer versions of EmojiOne, since renamed JoyPixels, support more recent Unicode Emoji versions, and use a stricter license that disallows the redistribution of vector images, while version 2.x is "no longer supported or distributed". EmojiTwo, an open-source fork of EmojiOne 2.2, aims to add all emoji from 2017 and later.
As part of the now-discontinued
Firefox OS
Firefox OS (project name: ''Boot to Gecko'', also known as ''B2G'') is a discontinued open-source operating system made for smartphones, tablet computers, smart TVs, and dongles designed by Mozilla and external contributors. It is based on the ...
project,
Mozilla
Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...
developed an emoji font named FxEmojis. Mozilla also packaged a version of Twitter's Twemoji font converted to a COLR/CPAL layered format font, named "Twemoji Mozilla". Older versions of the latter Mozilla project instead packaged the EmojiOne font, as "EmojiOne Mozilla".
The font ''Symbola'' contains all emoji through version 10.0 as normal monochrome glyphs. Through version 10, Symbola was made available
without a license nor any restrictions on use; beginning with version 11 in 2018, Symbola has been copyrighted with a ban on commercial use and derivative works. Other typefaces including a significant number of emoji characters include
Noto Emoji, Adobe Source Emoji, and
Quivira
Quivira is a place named by Spanish conquistador Francisco Vásquez de Coronado in 1541, for the mythical Seven Cities of Gold that he never found.
Quivira was a province of the ancestral Wichita people, located near the Great Bend of the Arkans ...
.
Footnotes
References
{{reflist
Emoji