The emoticon era

Long before emoji existed, people expressed tone in plain text using emoticons built from punctuation — a colon and a parenthesis for a smile, for example. These worked on any system that could display basic characters, which made them universally compatible but visually limited.

The first emoji

Emoji were created in Japan in the late 1990s for early mobile phones, designed as small pictograms to convey emotion and information more efficiently than text alone in the limited space of a phone screen.

Standardization through Unicode

As smartphones spread globally, different manufacturers displayed emoji inconsistently, so the Unicode Consortium — the organization responsible for standardizing text characters across all computing platforms — began formally including emoji in its standard. This meant an emoji sent from one type of phone or app would reliably appear, even if styled differently, on another.

Why the same emoji looks different across apps

Unicode standardizes what an emoji means and its underlying code point, not exactly how it looks. That's why the same grinning face emoji can appear with slightly different art styles on an iPhone, an Android phone, and a website, even though they all represent the same character.

Emoji today

New emojis are proposed and reviewed by the Unicode Consortium each year, with contributions from the public, companies, and advocacy groups, and the set now includes thousands of characters covering expressions, objects, professions, food, animals, and flags from around the world.