[GlitchMr]

Emoji was supported for a long time on Japanese phones. Apple wanted to sell iPhones in Japan, so they implemented emojis using Unicode's Private Use Area which initially was a feature only available in Japan, but people quickly figured out how to use them outside of Japan.

Emojis became a rather popular feature of iPhones, and Android wanted to have emojis as well, however using Private Use Area just like iPhones did wasn't ideal, so they made a proposal to Unicode Consortium to encode emojis in Unicode.

Later, there was a lot of demand to add new emojis, so more and more emojis got encoded into the standard.

[masklinn]

> Emoji was supported for a long time on Japanese phones

nit: the west did not wait for emoji to add pictorial representations in text.

Dingbats are centuries old, and they’ve been part of unicode from the start.

[jariel]

Oh, I understand all of that of course. I meant some kind of Unicode-specific debate over how it should all work and what the alternatives were.

[throw0101a]

> Emoji was supported for a long time on Japanese phones.

The Unicode folks should have stopped at supporting the legacy symbol set. It would have been perfectly reasonable.

At this point emojis have become a weed, which any random idea and variation seemingly being accepted.