Also as Alex Hern, writing in The Guardian, points out: “Because of the way emojis are created – approved by a non-profit organisation, the Unicode Consortium, but then drawn by individual companies including Apple, Facebook, Twitter and Google – the same icon can look very different when sent across platforms.”
This has caused some confusion – a pot of food emoji is a paella on Google and Microsoft but a stew on Apple and Samsung and there was a period when a pistol was a water gun on an iPhone and a real one on Android devices.
While that may have made dinner and gun club WhatsApp discussions a little confusing for a while, there is an effort by the Unicode Consortium to standardise emojis across platforms and as always every year will bring about new additions to the emoji vocabulary but hopefully no sequel to the terribly ill advised Emoji animated film.
For now we still have words but perhaps sometimes the addition of emojis helps to overcome the still difficult problem of conveying emotion and tone in texts. If you can’t say it with words then you can always rely on an emoji to make your point clearly – except of course when it comes to aubergines, whose reputation has unfortunately been forever tarnished.
BY: Tymon Smith