Discussion
Unsung
comrade1234: :) I've been using emojis since the 90s... ;)
fenomas: Those are emoticons ;)Emoji originally came from Docomo phones in Japan around 1999. (Or I think those were the first ones actually called "emoji"; some other earlier devices had similar character sets.)
Cockbrand: 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.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r: 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 in the 2010s. The past and present of text encoding, especially text message encoding, was/is a huge mess. I wouldn’t be running in guns blazing if I were them.
bombcar: The number of unicode processing bugs that existed (and maybe some still exist) alone is reason to be a bit cautious.And having emojis work "mostly" but not "everywhere" would have been something Jobs would have entirely been against - if they wouldn't work over normal non-iMessage SMS, for example, or not work reliably.Remember the "emojigate" issues where the same emoji would display differently on different phones and make a funny message seem threatening, etc?
esafak: Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words, with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.
something765478: I believe they do. When people talk in person, there is a lot of non verbal communication that give context to their words (smiles, shrugs, side glances, etc). Even when it's just people talking over the phone, the way they pronounce words carries information (it's a lot easier to tell if someone is being sarcastic if you hear their voice, for example). So, emojis are useful for providing that missing context.
esafak: That's a great point, but I am skeptical that emojis adequately carry the affect of nonverbal communication. I believe you make a case for sending audio/video messages alongside the text.
threetonesun: 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.
egypturnash: How do you feel about plaintext smilies? People were doing those long before emoji existed. :) :p :D
esafak: The same way. For me the proper use of emojis is in reactions, to cut down on brief responses that cause clutter and undesirable notifications. I am less welcoming of them in the middle of a message, where they don't serve that purpose.
arcfour: Sometimes when I see emoji now I look back and remember doing this on my old iPod Touch back when I was young and thinking I was so cool. It's funny to remember a time before emoji was ubiquitous when you had to go out of your way to use it.
conductr: Short text communication has a way of being read as terse, rude, or with some other unintended emotion by the recipient so I think it’s a valuable way to communicate concisely but also encode the mood of the wordsAnd yes, many things can be communicated purely on emotion and no words, which in short form is also valuable
Zak: The obsession with control I find objectionable is not their decision not to enable emoji widely until support was stable. That's an obsession with polish, not control. The commitment to polish and self-restraint to not add features until they actually work well is something I've long appreciated about Apple.The control part is blocking third-party apps to toggle the hidden setting. If you enable unsupported features using a third-party app, the expectation of polish is obviously void. It would even be fine if Apple refused to carry apps like that in their polished, curated store, if they didn't forbid users from installing apps any other way.
ryandrake: It's the standard Apple "We will decide what you can run on your own computer, not you" paternalism that we have come to know and expect, and that they have perfected over the decades.
Zak: That wasn't the standard on the Mac, and looks like it still isn't. That platform has a strong tradition of utility apps that add to or modify core OS functions, and when I looked up "essential mac utilities" today, I found recent listicles with items like Alt Tab (an app switcher), Magnet (window management shortcuts), and TinkerTool (change hidden system settings - exactly like emoji toggles for iPhone).The iPhone was a big departure from that.
Nevermark: > Steven was the enterprising developer who actually discovered how to give emoji to any iPhone, all the way back in 2008.I love how this person gets the credit, deservedly so, and the irony of the unsung people who did all the hard work of actually creating the support but with its potential nerfed.Perhaps a rehabilitation committee can track those people down and we can give their stories and their soulless managers some well earned justice!
myhf: If only they had used "AI", then all of the credit could have gone to "AI" instead of any of the people who did the work.
sph: Throwback to the days HN had emojis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547056
nancyminusone: Anyone else remember the brief time in the mid 2000s that these were called "smileys" and damn near every webpage ad wanted to install a questionable IE 6 toolbar so you could "get more smileys"?Quality kid memory for me. I also remember watching another kid click on an ad for a free ipod and then enter in his home address and other personal info.
lelanthran: Smileys were something else (pure acid, like this :-)).ISTR the brief time you mention calling these things emoticons.
bityard: You have it backwards, sir, :-) are the emoticons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons
bityard: The wikipedia entry for emoji is missing this entirely, but "smileys" were quite popular in various instant messaging apps (AOLIM, ICQ) and web forums. I was fairly sure they go back as far the mid or late 90's but I can't seem to find any hard evidence of that.(I was into computers at the time but didn't see the point of IM apps or forums when IRC and Usenet already existed.)
asdff: 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.
philistine: Hazehover is a new rising superstar. It darkens the unfocused app windows. So I guess it's a dark star ;)
SoftTalker: I think they are overused and thus lose effectiveness. I don't really like them and don't use them myself but I'm not going to fight a battle over them.
Aerroon: They obviously make communication worse. I frequently trigger the stupid emoji keyboard by accident on my phone and every time I do I wish it wouldn't exist.It also doesn't help that we already had perfectly acceptable emoticon systems beforehand that were better than current emojis because they were customizable.
SoftTalker: You can disable it. I did.
OptionOfT: Testing if it still works:> I just tried this, sending from Verbs (iOS 5 supports emoji since forever), and yes, I can see the with no problem whatsoever :-)I just tried this, sending from Verbs (iOS 5 supports emoji since forever), and yes, I can see the with no problem whatsoever :-)Edit: completely swallowed!
harrall: Words don’t have precise meanings either.“He has completed the task.”versus“He pulled it off.”Their meanings are the same but their both have different subtext.Emojis are simply additional levers for subtext. It’s like using a red hot colors versus cool colors for a poster — the text might be the same but the colors provide an additional way to signal subtext.The more options, the better.
esafak: It is the precision of language that allows you to distinguish the subtext of those two sentences.
harrall: But by that line of thinking, it’s the same with emojis. There is a subtly to which ones you use and when.You don’t just put the same laugh emoji every time it’s funny…
burningChrome: So then, was it the same thing waiting 5 years longer than most companies to have something as basic as wireless charging? Or waiting until 2023 to finally adopt USB C charging?
TazeTSchnitzel: A really cool feature of Windows Live Messenger (perhaps also MSN Messenger before it?) was you that smileys were viral. You could add your own, and people could right-click on the ones you used to copy them to their own collection.
nodar86: It was great! And in MSN Messenger you could assign any string to be replaced by the smiley (which were basically any image including animated gifs) so some people’s writing was totally unreadable as letter or phrases were replaced with these images. Fun times
WalterBright: I used emojis for a while. Every text had to have an emoji. I spent a lot of time scrolling through the emoji palette looking for the perfect emoji.Eventually, I decided that was a complete waste of time and now I use words.BTW, one of the things that turned me off from emojis is they looked like the stickers 2nd graders would use, along with a Playmobil look.
vee-kay: Yahoo Messenger had amazing fun animated smileys, and it was a fantastic Instant Messenger as well. Too bad Yahoo went to dogs, I was hoping Yahoo Messenger got bought out by Microsoft so that beautiful UI could be integrated as MS Office chat. Instead, Micro$oft acquired Skype, mainly for its VOIP ability, and it took years to integrate it into MS Office as MS Teams, which is a boring tool (but it is effective for video conferencing and basic chat purposes).I miss those animated smileys.Even WhatsApp and other popular social messaging platforms (Instagram, Signal, etc.) don't have them. Instead, we got GIFs (whose online gallery takes ages to load in WhatsApp, in recent months, at least on my phone) and animated stickers. sigh
seba_dos1: Even Gadu-Gadu had them.
jamesnorden: I'm confused as to why apps were able to edit this file.
TazeTSchnitzel: I think I remember using one of these apps around 2010 or so, and I think it just triggered the emoji keyboard to appear somehow? And once it was opened once, the ability to use it persisted. But that was just my guess as to what was happening as a user.I really doubt Apple's sandbox would have permitted editing a global preferences file like that. That might have just been the first, and not the only, method to enable emoji that people discovered.
krackers: No, I think it really did allow it. You can see the source for those emoji enabler apps in [1]. I think that various AppKit APIs do end up writing to that file so r/w access to that file may have been required. And in those days sandboxing probably wasn't as tight.[1] https://github.com/lilyball/emojienabler/blob/ac90ef6e1ac817...
suddenlybananas: Why didn't Apple want emoji enabled?
peyton: They were in Softbank’s private use area, so no interop story really.
esafak: I think there is a difference: with emojis, only the sender knows the precise meaning. Words have agreed on definitions.
kanbara: go tell that to genz who use :skullemoji: or koreans who dislike pinching hand emoji, or anyone who knows what a heart, dollar bills, sleepy face or whatever else means.we make up words all the time, and they are in fact not all "agreed upon" because language changes, like how awesome used to mean "inspiring awe" and "literally" now means "figuratively" and how "google" and "tweet" are words.emoji change meaning quicker than words, yes, but that's because the were born online and because they are easier to add semantic meaning to. they're pretty neat, to be honest.even in a corporate setting we use emoji all the time to +1 things, to confirm something, or on video calls to give kudos, and more.
drw85: I just think there are far too many. Sometimes I just want to add a happy face and there are 500 variations. Then I find one which I think looks happy and hover over it for a second and the tooltip says “shivering anxious constipated”.
badc0ffee: 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.
joshuaissac: > short-livedOutlook was doing this even 3-4 years ago.
NetMageSCW: Cydia and jail breaking replaced hacking HP calculators for a few years for me.
NetMageSCW: They waited to adopt USB-C for mobile because the trust third parties put into Apple was founded on the fact that they guaranteed ten years of support for Lightning and that’s why it was only iPhone that had accessories like clock radio docks and thermal cameras and external Lightning based peripherals for a long time.
badc0ffee: 3-4 years ago I hope it was actual emojis, and not Wingdings.
rpdillon: Apple does tend to drag their feet a bit, though.If I recall correctly, it took two years for them to add cut and paste to iOS.
joshuaissac: It was Wingdings.But they do use Unicode emojis now.
