It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

suddenlybananas

Why didn't Apple want emoji enabled?

UqWBcuFx6NV4r

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.

comrade1234

:) I've been using emojis since the 90s... ;)

Cockbrand

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.

dilap

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

> 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

Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words, with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.

xd1936

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

arcfour

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

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

I'm confused as to why apps were able to edit this file.

sph

Throwback to the days HN had emojis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547056

avazhi

Why is this dude acting like emojis were and are some kind of indispensable communicative tool? They are no less today than they were then something fit for kids and unserious conversations, which is why they only ever make the news when a head of state or CEO uses one when he shouldn’t have and, revealing a lack of seriousness or professionalism vis a vis whatever he’s referring to. Our lives would be no worse if they weren’t on the iPhone today.