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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

What about it? This is a problem for font authors and on reasonable OSes you can choose your font.

It's not just a problem for font authors. What happens with this can change the intent of what people are writing pretty radically. If someone tweets "I support [afghanistan flag]" and that's seen by the wrong people with the wrong font it can literally mean the difference between life and death for the poster.

Edit: Flag emojis aren't supported on HN

See also, Mobile vendors change the gun emoji to a picture of a squirt gun. Are you sending someone a death threat or telling them to cool off with a super soaker?

https://www.inverse.com/article/44132-google-gun-emoji-goes-....

I'm still kind of surprised we haven't had a news story in which a school official with an iPhone tweeted:

"Come to family water day and bring your :gun emoji:"

And parents with an (older) Android phone saw it and became very upset!

Also: (sorry to respond twice) but the flag will show up the same way per device regardless of who the message comes from anyway.

If it's that much of an issue they should just remove the flag and the messages will be sent as |A||F|.

The two OSes with emojis most thoroughly embedded throughout (Android and iOS) are not "reasonable" by your definition. That's fair, but it rather shuts down discussion on the subject of emojis.

By that argument, mobile OSes are unreasonable because they make it difficult to install fonts.

Mobile OSes are unreasonable in general because you can't manage many aspects of the system, fonts being one of the most basic ones.

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