With the Iran example, it's an interesting world we live in where the design of an emoji by some of the largest companies in the world can support or detract recognition of new states. Especially with some of these tech companies bending the knee to the current US administration I could imagine a world where there are executive orders to say, remove the Greenland flag, or change the design of the Venezuela flag.

Shameless plug, but if you want to see more about emojis. I made a museum:

https://emojistime.com/museum

> Described as "emoji fragmentation" by some, it was clear that various emoji vendors' designs were highly inconsistent with one another, often leading to embarrassing miscommunications.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: I still don't understand why anyone thought standardizing emojis as Unicode code points (without defining what exactly they should look like, i.e. leaving the glyphs almost entirely up to the font & UI/UX designers) was a good idea. I mean, it's not like facial expressions on their own are not already difficult enough to decipher, they had to add even more ambiguity by letting each app designer choose different glyphs? It's incredibly easy for the tone and meaning of a text message to change depending on what its emojis look like.

    With a sufficient number of users of an API,
    it does not matter what you promise in the contract:
    all observable behaviors of your system
    will be depended on by somebody

As someone that used the original emotes, all this graphics emojis just don't make any sense. There are just too many, and i have to lookup what they mean in isolation and try to dig what they mean in sequence... I dont have the context the user had when he constructed the sequence of emojis and i cant understand what they are trying to communicate, at this point it is easier to just say the words.

Still mad that the gun was nerfed.

I think this article just makes the case for what incredibly terrible idea emojis are in general.

Someone writes a text in 2016. Three years later, despite the text data remaining unchanged, the semantics are completely different because all vendors decided to change what the text should look like.

I'm not sure if this has ever happened in the history of text. The worst thing we had was encoding issues that were pretty obvious when it happened. Now you need to be aware of every change ever made to emojis and divine which platform the author was writing from to be able to tell what the message was actually supposed to be.

I wonder how hard some folks ant Apple had to work to keep Alan Dye away from the Emoji design.