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Comment by est31 | Hacker News Reader

I think if you ship the font in your app to get consistent emoji renderings across platforms (no need to dump unicode for this) you might have appeased the people who want emojis to look the same on all platforms, but then you will enrage the people who want emojis on all of their apps to look the same.

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So how much space will be wasted shipping a bunch of fonts that all include however many goddamned emojis there are?

Seems like the number is about 7MB[1] per font, looking at a real world example.

1. https://imgur.com/a/iMHYtjB

I suspect the latter is a significantly smaller group though - I would expect people care more about their messages coming across unchanged

Interesting. I’d think the opposite: I bet the number of times the average user looks at their own message on someone else’s device is pretty low, while they might have a chance to notice the differences in emoji between app A and app B on their own device several times per day.

> I bet the number of times the average user looks at their own message on someone else’s device is pretty low

That is not the issue. The issue is that users expect the emoji they send to look the same to the receiver.

Geeks know that emojis are "characters" and therefor might look slightly different in different fonts. But this is not how the average user sees it. They see emojis as small images and expect them to transfer unaltered just like any other image they put into a message.

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