[HN Gopher] It took four years until 2011's iOS 5 gave everyone ...
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It took four years until 2011's iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji
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Author : tobr
Score : 121 points
Date : 2026-03-06 08:13 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unsung.aresluna.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (unsung.aresluna.org)
| suddenlybananas wrote:
| Why didn't Apple want emoji enabled?
| wildzzz wrote:
| Probably because they weren't well supported in the West at the
| time and Apple didn't want people sending messages and emails
| from their iPhone with missing glyphs. It's one of those things
| you need a consensus for, both the sender and recipient have to
| support it. It's not something like iMessage where Apple only
| has to worry about their own ecosystem.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| They weren't standard yet. Sending messages containing Unicode
| Private Use Area glyphs that not even other Apple products
| could display, let alone other vendors' (non-Japanese) phones,
| would be an interoperability nightmare.
| UqWBcuFx6NV4r wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| mikkupikku wrote:
| I thought it was weird when they made the gun emoji look like
| a toy.. to make threats seem funny? Or some sort of Sapir-
| Whorf thing? I don't know, it never made sense.
| bombcar wrote:
| It was more troubling that it was different - so you send a
| squirt gun, I see a pistol, but even worse was that it was
| pointing in different directions on different platforms.
| Zak wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| philistine wrote:
| Hazehover is a new rising superstar. It darkens the
| unfocused app windows. So I guess it's a dark star ;)
| butlike wrote:
| I tried hazeover years ago and dropped it quite quickly.
| Something about the dimming caused visual confusion for
| me.
| conductr wrote:
| I think they were controlling the perception that third party
| apps could change your entire device settings. That was/still
| is something that iPhone users expect to be "safe". As in, if
| I carelessly install an unknown app, it at least can't do
| much harm and I can just delete it without having any real
| consequences. The existence of "hack apps" undermines that
| layman understanding of their device security
| Zak wrote:
| The problem there is that the primary security mechanism is
| enumerating badness by policing what apps users can
| install. That's not nearly as robust as designing the
| sandbox so apps _can 't_ do much harm. If toggling the
| setting is really dangerous, which it wasn't in this case,
| it should have been impossible for an app to do without
| some sort of special access.
|
| I _also_ think users should be in control of granting or
| denying that kind of special access, but that 's a separate
| discussion.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The problem with this is that it should be a permission the
| user needs to grant to the app rather than something that
| apps can never do under any circumstances even when the
| user explicitly wants them to. The latter is just the
| vendor declaring themselves by self-fiat to be immune from
| competition in the markets for those device software
| features.
| burningChrome wrote:
| 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?
| nancyminusone wrote:
| 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.
| post-it wrote:
| Don't forget cursor customizers!
| lelanthran wrote:
| Smileys were something else (pure acid, like this :-)).
|
| ISTR the brief time you mention calling these things
| emoticons.
| bityard wrote:
| You have it backwards, sir, :-) are the emoticons:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons
| badc0ffee wrote:
| 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.
| allenu wrote:
| You're probably right about the terminology being around
| for a while, but I think most people just called them
| smileys (i.e. ;) would be called a "winking smiley"). I
| remember seeing the term used maybe in the early- or
| mid-90s either on a BBS or Usenet and thinking "Ah,
| that's what they're called" and as a nerd being annoyed
| that nobody used that term colloquially.
| butlike wrote:
| I completely forgot about "J" and the discourse it causes
| amongst my friend group.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Microsoft Office used Wingdings, but forums (based on
| e.g. phpBB) or IMs would replace :) with an image.
| bityard wrote:
| 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.)
| vee-kay wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Even Gadu-Gadu had them.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| kilroy123 wrote:
| https://emojistime.com/museum
|
| If you want a trip down memory lane.
| paulddraper wrote:
| So Apple worked with emoji, or didn't?
| WalterBright wrote:
| 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.
| comrade1234 wrote:
| :) I've been using emojis since the 90s... ;)
| NoSalt wrote:
| emoticon != emoji
| inanutshellus wrote:
| =^o_o^=
|
| ^_^
|
| Ah the halcyon days of feelin' pompous for using random
| squigglies to convey emotion.
|
| Still remember being scandalized by the flip table emoticon
| using characters I couldn't find on my keyboard. So jealous I
| had to ...
|
| (+deg#deg)+( +-+
|
| well, not that actually. just paste, I guess.
| layer8 wrote:
| Those are rather kaomojis, though.
| fenomas wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| asdff wrote:
| 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.
| dilap wrote:
| I still remember the very first time I saw an emoji -- just an
| old-school dumb phone, and my friend sent me a message with an
| emoji, which the phone, amazingly, was able to display. I had no
| idea such a capability even existed, and wondered for a second if
| I was dreaming.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > 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!
| esafak wrote:
| Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words,
| with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.
| something765478 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| egypturnash wrote:
| How do you feel about plaintext smilies? People were doing
| those _long_ before emoji existed. :) :p :D
| esafak wrote:
| 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.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| I think some emoji have directly and already entered the
| colloquial lexicon of being essentially emotional content
| punctuation marks and modifiers. It's still a different
| communication channel than facial, body language, and tonal
| modifiers of physical presence and verbal communications,
| but it still feels like the gap is closing.
|
| There are also ways that emoji used as such are better, or
| at least more accessible, than their facial/body language
| counterparts: a screen reader can read the name of an emoji
| to a blind person to get a sense of it whereas facial
| recognition software that can verbalize such things still
| isn't always so accurate; that same tool of glancing at an
| emoji name is also open to neuro-divergent and other
| differently abled people that may have difficulty
| interpreting facial expressions and body language in real
| time.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I don't know why you're being downvoted, but it's exactly
| this.
|
| Pre-emojis, there were _so many times_ I misinterpreted a
| text, or had a text misinterpreted. Something that is
| obviously a joke or sarcasm or teasing _with_ non-verbal
| communication, can come across as an insult without it. When
| somebody adds a wink emoji or similar at the end, it changes
| everything.
|
| Emoji are fantastic at communicating tone and attitude
| _alongside_ the text itself. They 're not a 1-1
| correspondence with non-verbal communication, or a perfect
| replacement, but they vastly improve the chances that
| something playful isn't misunderstood in a negative way.
| kg wrote:
| Most words don't have especially precise meanings, context is
| everything. So emojis being imprecise is not a unique problem.
|
| And emojis can be especially dense with information in a way
| that can be pretty convenient. You can scan a 96x32 pixel block
| of 3 emojis to quickly gather information that would have
| required reading 1-2 whole sentences, potentially.
|
| Emoji are also more 'casual' in a way that can be helpful. You
| can tap the 'heart' emoji on a message to a colleague or friend
| to express your gratitude or thanks for something without
| having to prevaricate over exactly what language to use to
| avoid seeming insincere or overly affectionate.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| > Emoji are also more 'casual' in a way that can be helpful.
| You can tap the 'heart' emoji on a message to a colleague or
| friend to express your gratitude or thanks for something
| without having to prevaricate over exactly what language to
| use to avoid seeming insincere or overly affectionate.
|
| I think this might be one of the few points that this emoji
| use which you mention feels almost universal to me across all
| ages for the most part.
|
| It just saves time if you can heart a message without saying
| I agree with you.
|
| Additionally if the emoji itself is a reaction (say how
| Github/Discord heart emoji can work) then this is even better
| at times and how most of us sometimes use it because that way
| the conversation doesn't steer itself because they have
| nothing to respond to but they still see that you appreciated
| them. Win Win situation.
|
| > Most words don't have especially precise meanings, context
| is everything
|
| If someone wants words to have precise meanings, English
| isn't the best language for it. Sanskrit/Polish is. I was
| taught sanskrit during school and I think that a language
| having too precise meaning can actually take too much time to
| think and this just makes conversation take too long. It can
| also be that Sanskrit is almost extinct in verbal form aside
| from religious scriptures and rituals now so its just way too
| hard to learn the language even though we know fluent hindi.
| (FWIW It had 7 tenses IIRC and single/duo/plural for a single
| root verb)
|
| I am not sure about polish tho but I am speaking this because
| I have only heard polish be also described as a language with
| more precise meaning and there was a HN post about it
| sometime ago in the context of AI.
| threetonesun wrote:
| 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.
| tomashubelbauer wrote:
| Decorative emojis in headings and lists help me skim
| documents faster than I'd otherwise be able to.
| basilikum wrote:
| How?
| threetonesun wrote:
| I'm curious how. I rarely see the emojis line up with the
| content of the header in a way that makes parsing reading
| the header any easier.
| acheron wrote:
| /s is incredibly dumb as well. "Hey look everyone, I made a
| joke! Aren't I clever?"
| conductr wrote:
| 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 words
|
| And yes, many things can be communicated purely on emotion and
| no words, which in short form is also valuable
| harrall wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It is the precision of language that allows you to
| distinguish the subtext of those two sentences.
| harrall wrote:
| 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...
| mock-possum wrote:
| Unquestionably enrich. Emojis and words are not mutually
| exclusive, communication is overall improved by allowing a
| richer variety of expression.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Emojis are stupid, but Japanese phone industry was weaponizing
| it to segregate smartphones into a niche subclass of non-
| serious phone-likes than actually usable phones, and so
| Google/Apple shoved it into Unicode to fill that moat. In
| hindsight, Slack style :emoji-name: notation might have done
| better for all, but Unicode emoji was what happened.
| Aerroon wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You can disable it. I did.
| acheron wrote:
| I disabled the emoji keyboard the first time it showed up and
| have never had it on since.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| zzrrt wrote:
| I used "decorative emojis" (some colored circles) to
| essentially color-code the labels in an app I don't control
| that only let me provide text labels. It's a little subjective,
| but I do believe it enhanced communication, from the data to
| the user, in that case.
| xd1936 wrote:
| Reminds me of typing "webos20090606" or
| "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart" into the webOS "Just
| Type" universal search bar, which revealed a hidden developer
| mode switch that allowed sideloading of apps.
|
| https://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Getting_started
| BoorishBears wrote:
| The best mobile OS we ever got, years ahead of its time, doomed
| by circumstances.
|
| The early (modern) smartphone days were something else
| arcfour wrote:
| 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.
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Fun fact: non-BMP Unicode emoji can't be sent in a standards-
| compliant SMS, which is UCS-2 (among other, even more limited,
| encoding options). Platforms that do let you send them are
| breaking the GSM spec by using UTF-16 instead, which leads to
| compatibility issues - for example, there were some older phones
| that just silently dropped messages containing emoji as
| malformed.
| jamesnorden wrote:
| I'm confused as to why apps were able to edit this file.
| leoh wrote:
| Agreed
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| 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.
| sph wrote:
| Throwback to the days HN had emojis:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547056
| OptionOfT wrote:
| 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!
| YesBox wrote:
| Wow, that's comparatively _very_ colorful. If they were kept, I
| wonder how HN 's userbase would be different. Or how the
| culture would be different today. It's a different experience
| being able to communicate with colorful symbols. You can imply
| or compact a lot of words into one emoji :D
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