Why Does Apple Add New Emoji?

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. There is some new Emoji characters coming out. But why did Apple spend time in creating new emoji instead of adding features or fixing bugs? Let's take a look. 

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So there is some new emoji characters coming out that should be in iOS 17.4 and iPad OS and macOS at about the same time. So once you have updated to those operating systems you can look for these six new characters as well as a few other ones. For instance, there are going to be characters in wheelchairs facing both left and right in the new set. The new ones here include Shaking Head both vertically and horizontally, a Phoenix emoji, a Lime emoji, a brown mushroom, and also a Broken Chain emoji.

Now what do those new characters mean? Well, emoji character definitions are open to interpretation. So some of them have some pretty obvious things. Like a broken chain, that could mean, say, breaking up with somebody or quitting a job or it could be a misconnection, something like that. But what you actually use it for depends on the context and also it depends on your region and the type of industry or groups you're involved in. Or maybe even just your very small group of friends. Emojis can mean very different things to different people.  For instance the Phoenix emoji, well a phoenix metaphorically is something rising from the ashes but it could simply look like your high school mascot. You can think of some uses for these emojis now but maybe two or three years from now people will come up with completely different things that these can mean that gain some sort of popular traction. 

Now, of course, whenever new emoji characters come out people ask, well why did Apple come out with these. First, it is important to realize that Apple doesn't make emoji. Emoji characters are decided upon by a group called the Unicode Consortium. It's a California based non-profit organization that includes a whole board with a variety of people that will vote on decisions, like which new emoji characters to add. But it doesn't just oversee emoji characters. It will oversees all characters. So it is a way to make sure that when you type, say, a specific currency symbol on your iPhone and then send a message with that symbol to somebody on an android phone that they get the same currency symbol there and there is no confusion about what you mean. So all different characters that you type in all different languages on computers, that all goes through the Unicode Consortium. Now this group is actually made up of  member companies and individuals. You're going to recognize most of the names here, especially for the voting members. It includes companies like Apple, Adobe, Amazon, Goggle, and Microsoft. These are all the companies that make hardware and software that use the different characters. So the idea here is instead of one company deciding on its own which characters to add, a whole group of companies has this organization where they can all decide together. So you have the same characters available on one device from one company as you do on another device from another company. If you're using a specific app and that app has emoji characters in it the same emoji characters there, when sent to somebody using another device in another piece of software, will look the same on their end. 

Now the Unicode Consortium doesn't actually sit around and think of ideas for new emoji characters. Not at all. Instead they take submissions. So the general public submits characters and the Unicode Consortium considers them and votes on them. Undoubtedly when they get a lot of proposals for the same character that's when they know that they should probably take an action and add that character. You can submit your own proposal. There's a whole system at the site for submitting a new character idea. You can also go and look at all of the different submissions they've gotten in the past and what's happen to them. So if you look through this list you'll see which ones they decided not to add, but also which ones they did and when they were added. 

So a fun fact! Emoji actually comes from two Japanese words meaning picture character. Now it is kind of similar to the English word emotion. But there is really no relation except of course that the similarity between emoji and emotion probably has helped the name catch on. So why does there need to be an organization like the Unicode Consortium to decide which new characters are there? Well, the idea is to coordinate between all the companies so that Apple doesn't have different emoji characters then say android or Microsoft Windows. Basically all these companies can decide together which new characters to add and kind of coordinate the timing. The new releases of software don't always come out on the same day but usually within a few months new characters are added across all of the different devices and apps.

Now why does Apple even need to comply with this? Can't Apple just go off and create its own characters and do its own thing? Well, the idea is that if you are part of this consortium that you agree to go with everybody else so that it will all be coordinated. So say if you were to type an emoji character, like money flying away, on an iPhone and then sent it to somebody on an android phone they would actually get a character that is the same or very close to it. Otherwise it would just be chaos. We would be sending characters back and forth to our friends and they wouldn't be seeing the characters that we typed. 

Now even though the Unicode Consortium decides which new emoji characters should be there and comes up with a description for them it doesn't actually draw them. The drawings for each character depend on the company. So Apple draws its own version of each emoji and Goggle has its own for android and Samsung also has its own for its android phones and other apps and other companies draw their own versions. So there are multiple different versions of different characters. Now the idea is they are supposed to convey the same meaning. So they should be pretty close. But sometimes there are tiny little differences that don't really matter in the meeting but kind of are neat little easter egg inside the emoji. For instance, if you look at the Book emoji on Apple devices and you zoom into look at the words there you could just make out that it is advertising copy for old Apple Mac ads. In addition on the Coin you could see the words The Crazy Ones but of course that is only on the Apple version of the Coin. If you look at the Technologist emoji you'll see that, of course, they're using an Apple MacBook there. But if you looked on another set, like say the Microsoft set, you'll see that it is actually a Windows laptop they are using. They are real people that draw these emojis. As a matter of fact here's a good article written by one of the people that drew a lot of the original emoji set for Apple. Search for it if you want to know more about how they were created. 

So every time a new emoji characters are added there are always people that complain that Apple is spending time on new emoji characters but not time fixing the bugs that has been bothering them for years or adding a new feature that they really want. Of course it is important to realize that Apple is a big company. The people that take the time to draw the new emoji are not the same people that say software engineers working on a particular app. So the fact that somebody took a few hours to draw the new Phoenix emoji doesn't mean that some software engineer at the other side of the company had less time or money to spend fixing a bug or adding a new feature. It's the same for any big company or large supply chain. The farmer that grows the wheat that goes into your breakfast cereal isn't the same person that designs the box for the cereal. Apple is a big company and it could do lots of different things all at once. 

Also when new emojis come out there are a lot of people that proclaim that emoji aren't really important to them and they never use them. That's fine. But remember the Mac, iPhone, and iPad these are devices that are created for everybody, not just one person or one type of person. So what's important to one person isn't important to somebody else. Somebody may never use emoji and other people may use it all the time. Some people may use certain features of software and others may never use them. Certainly if emoji characters aren't important to you and something you don't want to use, you never need to use them. Just like you never need to use any feature of any app or part of your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. These devices do lots of things. You just use them for what you need them for.

So I hope you found this useful or at least informative. Thanks for watching.