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

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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

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.

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