Why are emojis and special symbols on MacOS and Windows different?

345 viewsOtherTechnology

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

4 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

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.

You are viewing 1 out of 4 answers, click here to view all answers.