The implementation of emoji 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 modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

is not prescribed but can vary between fonts and platforms, much like different

typeface A typeface (or font family) is a design of Letter (alphabet), letters, Numerical digit, numbers and other symbols, to be used in printing or for electronic display. Most typefaces include variations in size (e.g., 24 point), weight (e.g., light, ...

s. Depending on the different platforms, the emoji may be constantly implemented according to the latest recommendation, or it may not have been updated for some time and may not be covered by the latest Unicode, or it may follow its own standard. 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 (also SJIS, MIME name Shift_JIS, known as PCK in Solaris contexts) is a character encoding for the Japanese language, originally developed by the Japanese company ASCII Corporation in conjunction with Microsoft and standardized as JIS ...

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 un ...

sequence in the range F89F through F9FC (as expressed in

hexadecimal Hexadecimal (also known as base-16 or simply hex) is a Numeral system#Positional systems in detail, positional numeral system that represents numbers using a radix (base) of sixteen. Unlike the decimal system representing numbers using ten symbo ...

). Emoji pictograms on au by KDDI are specified using the 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 is a Japanese multinational investment holding company headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, that focuses on investment management. The group primarily invests in companies operating in technology that offer goods and services to customers in a m ...

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, bakkal, bodega, corner store, corner shop, superette or mini-mart is a small retail store that stocks a range of everyday items such as convenience food, groceries, beverages, tobacco products, lotter ...

(🏪) by SoftBank, but for a

wristwatch A watch is a timepiece carried or worn by a person. It is designed to maintain a consistent movement despite the motions caused by the person's activities. A wristwatch is worn around the wrist, attached by a watch strap or another type of ...

(⌚️) 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 corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

(for

Gmail Gmail is the email service provided by Google. it had 1.5 billion active user (computing), users worldwide, making it the largest email service in the world. It also provides a webmail interface, accessible through a web browser, and is also ...

) 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 standard. Three Private Use Areas are defined: one in the Basic Multilingual Plane (), and one each in, and nearly covering ...

(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, Io or Nio (, ; ; locally Nios, Νιός) is a Greek island in the Cyclades group in the Aegean Sea. Ios is a hilly island with cliffs down to the sea on most sides. It is situated halfway between Naxos and Santorini. It is about long an ...

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 contiguous 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 Logogram, logo-Syllabary, syllabic writing system that was used to write several languages of the Ancient Near East. The script was in active use from the early Bronze Age until the beginning of the Common Era. Cuneiform script ...

Egyptian hieroglyphs Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs ( ) were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt for writing the Egyptian language. Hieroglyphs combined Ideogram, ideographic, logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with more than 1,000 distinct char ...

, some modern scripts such as Adlam or Osage, and special-use characters such as Musical Symbols 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 l ...

. Unicode was originally designed as a 16-bit encoding, which could be represented in a pure 16-bit form known as

UCS-2 UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding that supports all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode. The encoding is variable-length as code points are encoded with one or two ''code units''. UTF-16 arose from an earli ...

. This corresponds to the

Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a contiguous 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 ...

(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 Deprecation is the discouragement of use of something human-made, such as a term, feature, design, or practice. Typically something is deprecated because it is claimed to be inferior compared to other options available. Something may be deprec ...

in favour of

UTF-16 UTF-16 (16-bit Unicode Transformation Format) is a character encoding that supports all 1,112,064 valid code points of Unicode. The encoding is variable-length as code points are encoded with one or two ''code units''. UTF-16 arose from an earli ...

, 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 Chinese characters are logographs used to write the Chinese languages and others from regions historically influenced by Chinese culture. Of the four independently invented writing systems accepted by scholars, they represent the only one ...

in the

Supplementary Ideographic Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a contiguous 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 ...

, including some of the

Cantonese Cantonese is the traditional prestige variety of Yue Chinese, a Sinitic language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. It originated in the city of Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton) and its surrounding Pearl River Delta. While th ...

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 wr ...

) 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 software, 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 rel ...

supported

and a variant of

UTF-8 UTF-8 is a character encoding standard used for electronic communication. Defined by the Unicode Standard, the name is derived from ''Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit''. Almost every webpage is transmitted as UTF-8. UTF-8 supports all 1,112,0 ...

excluding four-byte codes, thus not handling non-BMP characters correctly. Support for

UTF-32 UTF-32 (32- bit Unicode Transformation Format), sometimes called UCS-4, 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 ...

and full support for

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 ...

. 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 font.

OpenType OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. Derived from TrueType, it retains TrueType's basic structure but adds many intricate data structures for describing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corpora ...

version 1.8 standardizes all four. * is a multi-color

raster file:Rgb-raster-image.svg, upright=1, The Smiley, smiley face in the top left corner is a raster image. When enlarged, individual pixels appear as squares. Enlarging further, each pixel can be analyzed, with their colors constructed through comb ...

format, using raw bitmap data or embedded

PNG Portable Network Graphics (PNG, officially pronounced , colloquially pronounced ) is a raster-graphics file format that supports lossless data compression. PNG was developed as an improved, non-patented replacement for Graphics Interchange ...

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 * Disease vector, an agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen into another living organism Vector may also refer to: Mathematics a ...

format, using multiple single-color

(

TrueType TrueType is an Computer font#Outline fonts, outline font standardization, standard developed by Apple Inc., Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe Inc., Adobe's PostScript fonts#Type 1, Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the ...

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 ( , short for Joint Photographic Experts Group and sometimes retroactively referred to as JPEG 1) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degr ...

, PNG or

TIFF Tag Image File Format or Tagged Image File Format, commonly known by the abbreviations TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is w ...

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 Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

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 ...

specification, but not by the OpenType specification, and is planned for future releases of

and

macOS macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

. * SVG-in-OpenType (or OpenType-SVG) is a multi-color vector format (with support for embedded rasters), using embedded

SVG Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is an XML-based vector graphics format for defining two-dimensional graphics, having support for interactivity and animation. The SVG specification is an open standard developed by the World Wide Web Consortium sin ...

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 (also known as a color ramp or a color progression) specifies a range of position-dependent colors, usually used to fill a region. In assigning colors to a set of values, a gradient is a continuous colormap, ...

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 pr ...

. The format was introduced by

and is supported on

Android Android most commonly refers to: *Android (robot), a humanoid robot or synthetic organism designed to imitate a human * Android (operating system), a mobile operating system primarily developed by Google * Android TV, a operating system developed ...

, while the competing format was introduced by

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

, and is supported on

and

. SVG-in-OpenType was designed by

Mozilla Mozilla is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, publishes and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting free software and open standards. The community is supported institution ...

and

Adobe Adobe (from arabic: الطوب Attub ; ) 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 use ...

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. The successor to Windows 8.1, it was Software release cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on July 2 ...

, 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 Wi ...

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 curr ...

Safari A safari (; originally ) is an overland journey to observe wildlife, wild animals, especially in East Africa. The so-called big five game, "Big Five" game animals of Africa – lion, African leopard, leopard, rhinoceros, African elephant, elep ...

and

Microsoft Edge Microsoft Edge is a Proprietary Software, proprietary cross-platform software, cross-platform web browser created by Microsoft and based on the Chromium (web browser), Chromium open-source project, superseding Edge Legacy. In Windows 11, Edge ...

, but not by

Google Chrome Google Chrome is a 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, iOS, iPadOS, an ...

; 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 domain name, 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 DNS root zone, root zone of the nam ...

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 free font family comprising over 100 individual computer fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. , Noto covers around 1,000 languages and 162 writing systems. , Noto fonts cover a ...

project includes the Noto Color Emoji font, which supplies color glyphs for emoji characters.

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is an operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source operating system and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user ...

, 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.

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 was a cross-platform instant messaging (IM) 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 and Googl ...

application (independent of the keyboard in use), in both Hangouts and

SMS Short Message 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 phones exchange short text messages, t ...

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, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

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

font that was introduced earlier in

. 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 emoticons. ...

; 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 software versioning, major release of macOS, Apple Inc., Apple's operating system for Macintosh computers. It was announced at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 22, 2020, and w ...

, the key is also labeled as (globe) for consistency across macOS and

, 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 each year, 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 ...

, Apple announced that it will be adding 70 more emoji in its 2018

update, including the long-awaited, red hair, white hair, curly hair and bald emoji. On September 12, 2017, Apple announced that the

Messages A message is a unit of communication that conveys information from a sender to a receiver. It can be transmitted through various forms, such as spoken or written words, signals, or electronic data, and can range from simple instructions to co ...

app on the

iPhone The iPhone is a line of smartphones developed and marketed by Apple that run iOS, the company's own mobile operating system. The first-generation iPhone was announced by then–Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs on January 9, 2007, at ...

s with

Face ID Face ID is a Biometrics, biometric authentication facial recognition system, facial-recognition system designed and developed by Apple Inc. for the iPhone and iPad Pro. The system can be used for unlocking a device, making Apple Pay, payments, ac ...

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 , like the word ''sink'', despite the Hard and soft C, spelling of the participial forms ''synced'' and ''syncing''), short for lip synchronization, is a technical term for matching a Speech, speaking or singin ...

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 12 iOS 12 is the iOS version history, twelfth major release of the iOS mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc., Apple. Aesthetically similar to its predecessor, iOS 11, it focuses more on performance than on new features, quality improvemen ...

, 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. With release of iOS 13.2, Apple introduced over 70 new emojis, with

gender Gender is the range of social, psychological, cultural, and behavioral aspects of being a man (or boy), woman (or girl), or third gender. Although gender often corresponds to sex, a transgender person may identify with a gender other tha ...

neutral options, people holdings hands with various skin tones, as well full Unicode 12 and Unicode 12.1 emoji support. On release of iOS 14.5, over 100 new emojis are introduced. With the release of iOS 15.4, Apple introduced new emojis, implementing Unicode 14 emoji recommendations. Release of iOS 16.4 added Unicode 15 emoji. Release of iOS 17.4 added Unicode 15.1 emoji. Emojis from

are added to the

version released at the same time as the iOS version.

Mozilla (Firefox and Firefox OS)

As part of the now-discontinued

Firefox OS Firefox OS (project name: ''Boot to Gecko'', also known as ''B2G'') is a discontinued Open-source software, open-source operating system made for smartphones, tablet computers, smart TVs, and Matchstick TV, dongles designed by Mozilla and exte ...

project,

developed an emoji font named FxEmojis. Mozilla also packages 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". Since

50, emojis are rendered by the browser when the underlying platform lacks native support.

Linux

Ubuntu 18.04 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 Noto is a free font family comprising over 100 individual computer fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. , Noto covers around 1,000 languages and 162 writing systems. , Noto fonts cover all ...

. Some

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

s require the installation of extra fonts. Color emoji are supported by FreeType and

Cairo Cairo ( ; , ) is the Capital city, capital and largest city of Egypt and the Cairo Governorate, being home to more than 10 million people. It is also part of the List of urban agglomerations in Africa, largest urban agglomeration in Africa, L ...

Microsoft Windows

An update for

Windows 7 Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, ...

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

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

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

Internet Explorer Internet Explorer (formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer and Windows Internet Explorer, commonly abbreviated as IE or MSIE) is a deprecation, retired series of graphical user interface, graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft that were u ...

and

), but not by many graphics applications.

Windows 10 Anniversary Update Windows 10 Anniversary Update (also known as version 1607 and codenamed "Redstone 1") is the second major update to Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. The successor to Windows 8.1, it wa ...

added Unicode 9 emoji. In August 2022, Microsoft open sourced more than 1,500 of its 3D

to let creators remix and customize them. The library is available on

Figma Figma is a collaborative web application for interface design, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows. The feature set of Figma focuses on user interface and user experience design, with an empha ...

and

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

. Released in November 2023, update ''KB5032190'' for

Windows 11 22H2 The Windows 11 2022 Update (also known as version 22H2 and codenamed "Sun Valley 2") is the first major update to Windows 11. It carries the build number 10.0.22621. Five component updates were released for this version"Moment 1" with build 226 ...

added Unicode 15 emoji. However, they are missing from the final 22H2 version of Windows 10 since introduction of Unicode 12.

Social media platforms

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

and

Twitter Twitter, officially known as X since 2023, is an American microblogging and social networking service. It is one of the world's largest social media platforms and one of the most-visited websites. Users can share short text messages, image ...

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, Messengers, The Messenger or The Messengers may refer to: People * Courier, a person or company that delivers messages, packages, or mail * Messenger (surname) * Bicycle messenger, a bicyclist who transports packages through cities * M ...

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 version 2.2, an open-source font available under a

free content Free content, libre content, libre information, or free information is any kind of creative work, such as a work of art, a book, a software program, or any other creative content for which there are very minimal copyright and other legal limi ...

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. 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.

Footnotes

References

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