[BoppreH]

Having read the article, I still don't understand the point of 3D modeling emoji. Even the user interviews didn't mention it, and problems like "what the back of a smiling face looks like" sound entirely self-inflicted.

I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms. There are still significant differences between Android and iOS, for example. They recognize how subtle emoji interpretation is, so the only reasonable conclusion is that sender and receiver should see the same pixels.

[why_at]

>problems like "what the back of a smiling face looks like" sound entirely self-inflicted.

I think this is the funniest sentence I've ever read on Hackernews.

What are we doing with our lives?

[warumdarum]

Always look on the smile side of janus

[magicalist]

> I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms.

You can't really do this. Or, rather, it's already been done, but people choose not to do this.

Emoji are just unicode characters. How they're displayed depends on the font used. Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.

The one announced here is open source, for instance, but there's no way Apple is going to adopt it as the system default.

[BoppreH]

> You can't really do this.

"We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user. We understand users might prefer the current designs, and we are proud of the work our team has done, but we believe that consistent communication is more important, and individual users can always enable the override to get the old look back."

> Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.

Yeah, that's the problem. We can't rely on every user going out of the way to drive adoption, it has to be done centrally.

[magicalist]

> > Everyone could choose to use the same emoji font across platforms or apps, but they don't.

> Yeah, that's the problem. We can't rely on every user going out of the way to drive adoption, it has to be done centrally.

Well by "everyone" I meant platform companies, app makers, and website designers. There's literally no way you'll get them to agree on a font choice.

> "We've agreed with Apple to use their emoji glyphs on Android by default regardless of font, unless overriden by the user".

First you'd have to get Apple to license their emoji font, presumably open source and freely available if you truly want it to be standardized across platforms. Have they ever open sourced a font? Or get Apple to agree to use someone else's font as the system default. Have they ever done that?

Second, if you forbid app developers from choosing an emoji font, the Facebooks of the world are just going to work around you by stripping out the emoji and manually inserting theirs in. Somewhat ironically, by ignoring the platform emoji font, which can lead to some jarring text rendering if you're used to the system font, apps like Facebook are fulfilling your dream of standardized unicode across platforms...but of course, only for users of their apps.

Third, I think you really underestimate the fundamental disagreements here. The Unicode Technical Committee has a working group to try to improve unicode interoperability, and victories are on the level of getting vendors to agree if the standard for the Lotus emoji should mention that it shouldn't include a lillypad (they decided no[1]). They're working on this, but it's never going to be what you want.

In any case, I understand what you're saying and I wasn't dismissing the fact that the precise emoji design can influence why you used that emoji at all, which gets lost in the translation to another emoji font.

[1] https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2025/25230-esr-report-utc185.pdf

[tough]

I was wondering if they OS'd their SF font, but seems not?

interesting how people still provide tho https://github.com/bradleyhodges/SFWindows

[internet2000]

> I was hoping they had standardized how emoji look across platforms.

This is a step in that direction. The entire industry has been consolidating around Apple's look. Take a look at the old Google, Samsung and Microsoft versions of Woman dancer for a trip https://emojipedia.org/woman-dancing#designs

[skillina]

> The only reasonable conclusion is that sender and receiver should see the same pixels

Since switching to iPhone recently, I've been realizing that iMessage users are living in another world, and beginning to understand their emoji choices more. I assumed the double exclamation emoji was just some trend, but it turned out to be one of the preselected emoji for iMessage and I was just oblivious since I didn't use that software. Other notes include the "haha" emoji instead of the "tears of joy" and pink hearts instead of red.

There's no way to standardize this. People communicate in different ways. The whole point of emoji is to be creative. If there's one singular "correct" way to use an emoji then creativity is dead.

[warumdarum]

You can now add a excellent emoji to a thumbs up emojii and do a market penetration animation

[inigyou]

It must be for metaverse projects so that you can walk around to the back of a chat message.