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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I wish that websites would stop overriding the emoji icons and just use the platform default.

Fun fact – Apple will reject your app for using emojis in an unapproved way, for example as a UI element, button or reaction. Default system emojis can only be used within regular text. For any other use you have to import your own versions and can't use Apple's.

> For any other use you have to import your own versions and can't use Apple's.

You can use SF Symbols (https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guideline...: “You can use a symbol to convey an object or concept wherever interface icons can appear, such as in navigation bars, toolbars, tab bars, context menus, and within text”). That would not use Apple’s emojis, but wouldn’t require you to create your own versions.

>Apple will reject your app for using emojis in an unapproved way, for example as a UI element, button or reaction

Source? Signal seems to be using the native emojis for reacts, and they don't seem to be having issues.

Doesn't Slack violate that constraint? Slack allows (or at least seems to) using iOS system emoji to respond to messages.

you can't use a vector image of the emoticon (if you like it) ?

The way different platforms render emojis can change their perceived meaning. The most famous example is probably the pre-2016 Apple version of "grinning face with smiling eyes" which looked like a cringing face than a grinning one [1]. Obviously Apple eventually fixed that one, but if you want people to communicate across platforms without misunderstandings you should really ship your own emojis that are consistent everywhere.

1: https://emojipedia.org/beaming-face-with-smiling-eyes#design...

That reminds me again how much I love the Google blobs.

In general I would agree, but the platforms have also censored the gun emoji with the water gun .

I'm not sure why people call it censorship. Nothing is being censored.

I'm being censored because the sandwich emoji isn't a hoagie.

If emojis are speech then removing a particular one sure looks like censorship. Many people do consider them a form of speech, both socially and legally. For example, a thumbs up emoji can be considered agreeing to a contract.

Does the smiling face emoji look like a real face? No, it's a cartoon representation. Same for the handgun, which was replaced by a handgun that is also a cartoonish toy water gun. If anything it was brought more in-line with the rest of the icon style.

It wasn't removed, it was augmented.

That's a wild argument when the vast majority of emojis are designed to look like the real version.

Like when cigarettes are replaced with lollipops in cartoons, you can debate if it does anything for kids or changes the meaning of a show or even matters at all, but you call it censorship. That's what it is, by definition.

avoiding the terminology for a second, was the change for the better or worse?

The problem is that my platform is not your platform. And if I send you a water pistol with my phone and you receive a handgun on your PC, it is a problem.

So it makes sense for websites to force the rendering, so that everyone gets the same message.

Ideally, that pistol emoji mess shouldn't have started in the first place. It was clearly intended as a real gun, and variations in rendering shouldn't have impacted the meaning, but they did, and that's how we got there. If they wanted to off the real gun for a water pistol, they should have used a different code point, made keyboards only suggest that code point, and maybe censor the original pistol like they do swear words. No ambiguity.

When the platform is the web this means you get inconsistent emojis across browsers. Also Twitter has better designed emojis than any browser vendor hands down.

Apple has the best emoji's, without a doubt. Everything else is wish.com garbage - especially Twitter.

It's not, and also another reason Twitter has its own emojis is so that the Tweets have the same text wrapping on every platform. This means you can actually use the tweets as a canvas filled with emojis and know that the formatting will be the same everywhere.

The other vendors have improved significantly in the past few years… mostly by slowly converging toward Apple’s emoji design language.

This is just a special case of how different fonts appear different.

https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F300.pdf

This is a case of companies rendering 1F52B to something it is specifically not.

Well yes. I don't think it's really defensible to render a code point using a glyph with a different semantic meaning. But "inconsistent" emoji rendering will always be a thing.

Inconsistent implies there is some type of error in the rendering.

This was done on purpose.

To me "inconsistent" just means different. I agree it's intentional.

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