| My Opinion | Style | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 🙂 | Apple | 5️⃣ |
| 😁 | 1️⃣4️⃣ | |
| 😐 | 4️⃣ | |
| 😀 | Microsoft | 1️⃣3️⃣ |
| 🙃 | 1️⃣1️⃣ | |
| 🤮 | Samsung | 0️⃣ |
- If you can't tell which (platform) is which, well, that's embarrassing 😬
- Should I be this obsessed with emojis? I don't know. Is this cool? Definitely 😎
- Emojipedia is awesome! Go show them some love ❤️
- Different styles
- Apple is realistic, and most of them are good. Some are amazing 🎉
- Google is conservative. Not very realistic and not very silly; they're good in most occasions, and they're very all-purpose 🔧
- Twitter is, well, twitter. I don't know why they made a new emoji set, or what they hope to achieve with it, but I just wish Discord didn't use Twemoji (BetterDiscord EmojiReplace until then 💪) 😭
- Microsoft is cute. Very cartoonish, and I love it (maybe I just got used to it?). Windows 11 (or a late Win10 update; I'm not sure) brought a revamped emoji set, and the new emoji drawer is awesome. Microsoft is the reason I got into emojis. The emoji drawer could use some improvements, but it's cool as is. I just don't want to imagine what emojis were like before the revamp 😐
- WhatsApp introduced emojis to the masses. Their no-nonsense practical emojis are the reason emojis became so popular (at least here in India). Some are awesome, most are good, and others, well, they suck (why change the orientiation for the rofl and thinking emojis, just why?) 😅
- Samsung sucks. They don't need a new emoji set when they've got Noto Color, but they're stupid. And they suck 🗑️
HistoryTrivia- I don't know much emoji history, and I don't want to learn it either. What I do know is trivia 🌐
- Emojis are part of Unicode. Most people don't know this, but it's true. And Unicode decides what new emojis to add, and they release new emojis on 13 September each year (Day of the Programmer 🧑🏽💻). These are the latest emojis that were added to Unicode. You may not have seen these, though, since most platforms take forever to add new emojis (Google and WhatsApp are quicker).
- Emojis use variable length encoding. That is, instead of having 25 characters for each handshake skin tone combination, they have one for handshake and one for each skin tone. So 🤝+🏾+🏽 can be typed in to display 🫱🏾🫲🏽. This carries on over to other things too, like gender: ♀️+🧑🏽🔧=👩🏽🔧. In fact, the 🧑🏽🔧 itself is composed of 🧑🏽 and 🔧. (🏴☠️ is 🏴+☠️, which is pretty cool!) Although some platforms yet have to integrate this properly, it seems to work well on GitHub. Just paste a zero width joiner character in between the various emojis to make them one. Morover, if you paste in a medium-dark skin tone woman mechanic and press backspace, GitHub transforms it into a woman mechanic => a mechanic => a wrench 🎉
- The whole point of these special characters is to introduce diversity and inclusivity to emojis. The pregnant man and bearded woman emojis brought a lot of controversy, but it's part of a larger mission to make emojis diverse and inclusive. As for platforms, I have felt Apple to be the most inclusive and WhatsApp (and Samsung) to be the least inclusive. Apple was the first to introduce the pregnant man emoji, and they have always been the first to adopt Unicode's new skin tone and gender policies. Apple also has a clear differentiation between person, man, and woman variants, while other platforms often have the person variant looking the same as the man variant (except for shirt color). WhatsApp, on the other hand, arbitrarily assigns a gender to the "person" emojis. For technologist it's male, and for shrugging it's female 🤦🏽