I’ve noticed that the “Emoji & Symbols” pop-up window for MacOS (ctrl + cmd + spacebar) and Windows 11 (Windows logo + period) have similar-looking, yet slightly (or vastly) different emojis and symbols, some of which are in one OS but not the other. Emojis and symbols are a very regular part of many users’ methods of communication and documentation, to the point where some applications, such as Twitter (example of communication) and Notion (example of documentation) defer to auto-correcting one set of emojis from an OS to a set that makes the user experience consistent across different operating systems.
Why isn’t there an agreed-upon system or set of emojis/symbols that make the experience OS-agnostic?
In: Technology
Emojis are part of a character set(unicode), and it’s up to the font to associate what image goes with which character, the same as for normal letters and numbers. The standard dictates what each character represents, like the letter ‘s’ or “party hat”, but it doesn’t dictate an actual image that must be used to represent those.
There may also be copyright issues that prevent one company from just copying another.
The standardisation of emojis is just for the “description”, the actual picture itself is done by whoever happens to be implementing the emojis in the given situation. They haven’t all standardised in part because each company has spent money developing their own ones and don’t want to throw that away.
Similar to how you can write with different fonts when editing text (e.g. Arial, Helvetica, Roboto, Times New Roman), emojis are backed by a font too that ship together with these operating systems. These are proprietary fonts, so they’re different.
Some applications may opt to use their own sets however, so what they’ll do is simply replace the characters with images from their own set. Twitter’s Twemoji set is one such example, you’ll find used at various places, such as on Discord. These sets will (can) be consistent across platforms (idk if on iOS this is forbidden or not, so that might be an exception). This is also how e.g. Discord can allow for user-defined emojis.
And some other applications, like MS Teams, will even go as far as to replace these characters with full blown animations. Similar story.
This has been answered great by others here, but id like to just give some sense that can be used for any situation like this: when you ask “why not?” just ask yourself instead “why?”. What would be the reason to go through a whole process with tons of agreements and compromises to simply standardise an emoji font? I dont really see any good argument to spend that effort and resources, they look the same anyway, and all parties spent money developing them.
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