how do emojis work?

Question

like, Apple emojis look different on non-Apple devices. why/how is that?

In: 1

Answer 1

In computers, each character/letter is represented by a number.

By most common standards, an ‘a’ is 97, an ‘A’ is 65, a space is 32, a semicolon ; is 59, etc. Your computer or phone just looks at a table, and for each number it has to draw on screen a different thingie. Emoji are just other characters. The eyes emoji 👀 is just character 128064.

And, the same way that your computer or phone can display text in different fonts *(arial, verdana, comic sans, times new roman, etc..)*, each device or app has its own “font” for emoji.