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Why is this dude acting like emojis were and are some kind of indispensable communicative tool?

They are no less today than they were then something fit for kids and unserious conversations, which is why they only ever make the news when a head of state or CEO uses one when he shouldn’t have and, revealing a lack of seriousness or professionalism vis a vis whatever he’s referring to. Our lives would be no worse if they weren’t on the iPhone today.

It’s very easy for people, especially younger people, to look at this with a 2026 understanding of the ubiquity of emoji and scoff at how ludicrous Apple was being. Things were very different. Drive-by Apple decriers will attribute anything possible to Steve Jobs’ vague “desire to control”. The reality is there were things he would obsess over and plenty he would let pass him by. Emoji only made its way into Unicode in the 2010s. The past and present of text encoding, especially text message encoding, was/is a huge mess. I wouldn’t be running in guns blazing if I were them.

Anyone else remember the brief time in the mid 2000s that these were called "smileys" and damn near every webpage ad wanted to install a questionable IE 6 toolbar so you could "get more smileys"?

Quality kid memory for me. I also remember watching another kid click on an ad for a free ipod and then enter in his home address and other personal info.

The wikipedia entry for emoji is missing this entirely, but "smileys" were quite popular in various instant messaging apps (AOLIM, ICQ) and web forums. I was fairly sure they go back as far the mid or late 90's but I can't seem to find any hard evidence of that.

(I was into computers at the time but didn't see the point of IM apps or forums when IRC and Usenet already existed.)

A really cool feature of Windows Live Messenger (perhaps also MSN Messenger before it?) was you that smileys were viral. You could add your own, and people could right-click on the ones you used to copy them to their own collection.

It was great! And in MSN Messenger you could assign any string to be replaced by the smiley (which were basically any image including animated gifs) so some people’s writing was totally unreadable as letter or phrases were replaced with these images. Fun times

Yahoo Messenger had amazing fun animated smileys, and it was a fantastic Instant Messenger as well. Too bad Yahoo went to dogs, I was hoping Yahoo Messenger got bought out by Microsoft so that beautiful UI could be integrated as MS Office chat. Instead, Micro$oft acquired Skype, mainly for its VOIP ability, and it took years to integrate it into MS Office as MS Teams, which is a boring tool (but it is effective for video conferencing and basic chat purposes).

I miss those animated smileys.

Even WhatsApp and other popular social messaging platforms (Instagram, Signal, etc.) don't have them. Instead, we got GIFs (whose online gallery takes ages to load in WhatsApp, in recent months, at least on my phone) and animated stickers. sigh

Even Gadu-Gadu had them.

https://emojistime.com/museum

If you want a trip down memory lane.

Smileys were something else (pure acid, like this :-)).

ISTR the brief time you mention calling these things emoticons.

You have it backwards, sir, :-) are the emoticons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons

IIRC "smileys" were what you got from fonts like Wingdings, and I believe those were short-lived. You could type :) and MS Word or Outlook, for example, would "helpfully" give you the Wingdings happy face, which would show up as a J for anyone who didn't have that font.

:-) and friends were "emoticons" for decades.

Microsoft Office used Wingdings, but forums (based on e.g. phpBB) or IMs would replace :) with an image.

You're probably right about the terminology being around for a while, but I think most people just called them smileys (i.e. ;) would be called a "winking smiley"). I remember seeing the term used maybe in the early- or mid-90s either on a BBS or Usenet and thinking "Ah, that's what they're called" and as a nerd being annoyed that nobody used that term colloquially.

I completely forgot about "J" and the discourse it causes amongst my friend group.

Don't forget cursor customizers!

The obsession with control I find objectionable is not their decision not to enable emoji widely until support was stable. That's an obsession with polish, not control. The commitment to polish and self-restraint to not add features until they actually work well is something I've long appreciated about Apple.

The control part is blocking third-party apps to toggle the hidden setting. If you enable unsupported features using a third-party app, the expectation of polish is obviously void. It would even be fine if Apple refused to carry apps like that in their polished, curated store, if they didn't forbid users from installing apps any other way.

I think they were controlling the perception that third party apps could change your entire device settings. That was/still is something that iPhone users expect to be “safe”. As in, if I carelessly install an unknown app, it at least can’t do much harm and I can just delete it without having any real consequences. The existence of “hack apps” undermines that layman understanding of their device security

The problem there is that the primary security mechanism is enumerating badness by policing what apps users can install. That's not nearly as robust as designing the sandbox so apps can't do much harm. If toggling the setting is really dangerous, which it wasn't in this case, it should have been impossible for an app to do without some sort of special access.

I also think users should be in control of granting or denying that kind of special access, but that's a separate discussion.

The problem with this is that it should be a permission the user needs to grant to the app rather than something that apps can never do under any circumstances even when the user explicitly wants them to. The latter is just the vendor declaring themselves by self-fiat to be immune from competition in the markets for those device software features.

So then, was it the same thing waiting 5 years longer than most companies to have something as basic as wireless charging? Or waiting until 2023 to finally adopt USB C charging?

It's the standard Apple "We will decide what you can run on your own computer, not you" paternalism that we have come to know and expect, and that they have perfected over the decades.

That wasn't the standard on the Mac, and looks like it still isn't. That platform has a strong tradition of utility apps that add to or modify core OS functions, and when I looked up "essential mac utilities" today, I found recent listicles with items like Alt Tab (an app switcher), Magnet (window management shortcuts), and TinkerTool (change hidden system settings - exactly like emoji toggles for iPhone).

The iPhone was a big departure from that.

Hazehover is a new rising superstar. It darkens the unfocused app windows. So I guess it's a dark star ;)

I tried hazeover years ago and dropped it quite quickly. Something about the dimming caused visual confusion for me.

The number of unicode processing bugs that existed (and maybe some still exist) alone is reason to be a bit cautious.

And having emojis work "mostly" but not "everywhere" would have been something Jobs would have entirely been against - if they wouldn't work over normal non-iMessage SMS, for example, or not work reliably.

Remember the "emojigate" issues where the same emoji would display differently on different phones and make a funny message seem threatening, etc?

I thought it was weird when they made the gun emoji look like a toy.. to make threats seem funny? Or some sort of Sapir-Whorf thing? I don't know, it never made sense.

It was more troubling that it was different - so you send a squirt gun, I see a pistol, but even worse was that it was pointing in different directions on different platforms.

I used emojis for a while. Every text had to have an emoji. I spent a lot of time scrolling through the emoji palette looking for the perfect emoji.

Eventually, I decided that was a complete waste of time and now I use words.

BTW, one of the things that turned me off from emojis is they looked like the stickers 2nd graders would use, along with a Playmobil look.

So Apple worked with emoji, or didn't?

[dead]

Reminds me of typing "webos20090606" or "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart" into the webOS "Just Type" universal search bar, which revealed a hidden developer mode switch that allowed sideloading of apps.

https://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Getting_started

The best mobile OS we ever got, years ahead of its time, doomed by circumstances.

The early (modern) smartphone days were something else

Throwback to the days HN had emojis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547056

Testing if it still works:

> I just tried this, sending from Verbs (iOS 5 supports emoji since forever), and yes, I can see the with no problem whatsoever :-)

I just tried this, sending from Verbs (iOS 5 supports emoji since forever), and yes, I can see the with no problem whatsoever :-)

Edit: completely swallowed!

Wow, that's comparatively very colorful. If they were kept, I wonder how HN's userbase would be different. Or how the culture would be different today. It's a different experience being able to communicate with colorful symbols. You can imply or compact a lot of words into one emoji :D

> Steven was the enterprising developer who actually discovered how to give emoji to any iPhone, all the way back in 2008.

I love how this person gets the credit, deservedly so, and the irony of the unsung people who did all the hard work of actually creating the support but with its potential nerfed.

Perhaps a rehabilitation committee can track those people down and we can give their stories and their soulless managers some well earned justice!

[flagged]

It's been so long I had almost forgotten about this... there was also at some point a 3rd party camera app which had a secret setting (activated by entering some URL into iOS Safari), enabling the use of the volume buttons to trigger the shutter. When Apple found out, they banned the app from the App Store. Not much later, the iPhone's built-in camera app got that feature which we all take for granted now.

There was a time you could enter some url into ios safari and install cydia on the iphones in the apple store. They shut that inroad down pretty quick.

I still remember the very first time I saw an emoji -- just an old-school dumb phone, and my friend sent me a message with an emoji, which the phone, amazingly, was able to display. I had no idea such a capability even existed, and wondered for a second if I was dreaming.

I'm confused as to why apps were able to edit this file.

I think I remember using one of these apps around 2010 or so, and I think it just triggered the emoji keyboard to appear somehow? And once it was opened once, the ability to use it persisted. But that was just my guess as to what was happening as a user.

I really doubt Apple's sandbox would have permitted editing a global preferences file like that. That might have just been the first, and not the only, method to enable emoji that people discovered.

No, I think it really did allow it. You can see the source for those emoji enabler apps in [1]. I think that various AppKit APIs do end up writing to that file so r/w access to that file may have been required. And in those days sandboxing probably wasn't as tight.

[1] https://github.com/lilyball/emojienabler/blob/ac90ef6e1ac817...

Agreed

Fun fact: non-BMP Unicode emoji can't be sent in a standards-compliant SMS, which is UCS-2 (among other, even more limited, encoding options). Platforms that do let you send them are breaking the GSM spec by using UTF-16 instead, which leads to compatibility issues - for example, there were some older phones that just silently dropped messages containing emoji as malformed.

Sometimes when I see emoji now I look back and remember doing this on my old iPod Touch back when I was young and thinking I was so cool. It's funny to remember a time before emoji was ubiquitous when you had to go out of your way to use it.

Why didn't Apple want emoji enabled?

Probably because they weren't well supported in the West at the time and Apple didn't want people sending messages and emails from their iPhone with missing glyphs. It's one of those things you need a consensus for, both the sender and recipient have to support it. It's not something like iMessage where Apple only has to worry about their own ecosystem.

They weren't standard yet. Sending messages containing Unicode Private Use Area glyphs that not even other Apple products could display, let alone other vendors' (non-Japanese) phones, would be an interoperability nightmare.

They were in Softbank’s private use area, so no interop story really.

Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words, with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.

Words don’t have precise meanings either.

“He has completed the task.”

versus

“He pulled it off.”

Their meanings are the same but their both have different subtext.

Emojis are simply additional levers for subtext. It’s like using a red hot colors versus cool colors for a poster — the text might be the same but the colors provide an additional way to signal subtext.

The more options, the better.

It is the precision of language that allows you to distinguish the subtext of those two sentences.

But by that line of thinking, it’s the same with emojis. There is a subtly to which ones you use and when.

You don’t just put the same laugh emoji every time it’s funny…

Short text communication has a way of being read as terse, rude, or with some other unintended emotion by the recipient so I think it’s a valuable way to communicate concisely but also encode the mood of the words

And yes, many things can be communicated purely on emotion and no words, which in short form is also valuable

I used “decorative emojis” (some colored circles) to essentially color-code the labels in an app I don’t control that only let me provide text labels. It’s a little subjective, but I do believe it enhanced communication, from the data to the user, in that case.

Emojis are stupid, but Japanese phone industry was weaponizing it to segregate smartphones into a niche subclass of non-serious phone-likes than actually usable phones, and so Google/Apple shoved it into Unicode to fill that moat. In hindsight, Slack style :emoji-name: notation might have done better for all, but Unicode emoji was what happened.

Decorative emojis (the stuff AI loves to add to bullet lists) don't do much. On the other hand I'd say emojis at the start/end of a sentence are as meaningful as emoticons or /s or any other Internet shorthand for conveying intent.

Decorative emojis in headings and lists help me skim documents faster than I'd otherwise be able to.

I'm curious how. I rarely see the emojis line up with the content of the header in a way that makes parsing reading the header any easier.

How?

/s is incredibly dumb as well. “Hey look everyone, I made a joke! Aren’t I clever?”

I think they are overused and thus lose effectiveness. I don't really like them and don't use them myself but I'm not going to fight a battle over them.

I believe they do. When people talk in person, there is a lot of non verbal communication that give context to their words (smiles, shrugs, side glances, etc). Even when it's just people talking over the phone, the way they pronounce words carries information (it's a lot easier to tell if someone is being sarcastic if you hear their voice, for example). So, emojis are useful for providing that missing context.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, but it's exactly this.

Pre-emojis, there were so many times I misinterpreted a text, or had a text misinterpreted. Something that is obviously a joke or sarcasm or teasing with non-verbal communication, can come across as an insult without it. When somebody adds a wink emoji or similar at the end, it changes everything.

Emoji are fantastic at communicating tone and attitude alongside the text itself. They're not a 1-1 correspondence with non-verbal communication, or a perfect replacement, but they vastly improve the chances that something playful isn't misunderstood in a negative way.

That's a great point, but I am skeptical that emojis adequately carry the affect of nonverbal communication. I believe you make a case for sending audio/video messages alongside the text.

I think some emoji have directly and already entered the colloquial lexicon of being essentially emotional content punctuation marks and modifiers. It's still a different communication channel than facial, body language, and tonal modifiers of physical presence and verbal communications, but it still feels like the gap is closing.

There are also ways that emoji used as such are better, or at least more accessible, than their facial/body language counterparts: a screen reader can read the name of an emoji to a blind person to get a sense of it whereas facial recognition software that can verbalize such things still isn't always so accurate; that same tool of glancing at an emoji name is also open to neuro-divergent and other differently abled people that may have difficulty interpreting facial expressions and body language in real time.

How do you feel about plaintext smilies? People were doing those long before emoji existed. :) :p :D

The same way. For me the proper use of emojis is in reactions, to cut down on brief responses that cause clutter and undesirable notifications. I am less welcoming of them in the middle of a message, where they don't serve that purpose.

Unquestionably enrich. Emojis and words are not mutually exclusive, communication is overall improved by allowing a richer variety of expression.

Most words don't have especially precise meanings, context is everything. So emojis being imprecise is not a unique problem.

And emojis can be especially dense with information in a way that can be pretty convenient. You can scan a 96x32 pixel block of 3 emojis to quickly gather information that would have required reading 1-2 whole sentences, potentially.

Emoji are also more 'casual' in a way that can be helpful. You can tap the 'heart' emoji on a message to a colleague or friend to express your gratitude or thanks for something without having to prevaricate over exactly what language to use to avoid seeming insincere or overly affectionate.

> Emoji are also more 'casual' in a way that can be helpful. You can tap the 'heart' emoji on a message to a colleague or friend to express your gratitude or thanks for something without having to prevaricate over exactly what language to use to avoid seeming insincere or overly affectionate.

I think this might be one of the few points that this emoji use which you mention feels almost universal to me across all ages for the most part.

It just saves time if you can heart a message without saying I agree with you.

Additionally if the emoji itself is a reaction (say how Github/Discord heart emoji can work) then this is even better at times and how most of us sometimes use it because that way the conversation doesn't steer itself because they have nothing to respond to but they still see that you appreciated them. Win Win situation.

> Most words don't have especially precise meanings, context is everything

If someone wants words to have precise meanings, English isn't the best language for it. Sanskrit/Polish is. I was taught sanskrit during school and I think that a language having too precise meaning can actually take too much time to think and this just makes conversation take too long. It can also be that Sanskrit is almost extinct in verbal form aside from religious scriptures and rituals now so its just way too hard to learn the language even though we know fluent hindi. (FWIW It had 7 tenses IIRC and single/duo/plural for a single root verb)

I am not sure about polish tho but I am speaking this because I have only heard polish be also described as a language with more precise meaning and there was a HN post about it sometime ago in the context of AI.

They obviously make communication worse. I frequently trigger the stupid emoji keyboard by accident on my phone and every time I do I wish it wouldn't exist.

It also doesn't help that we already had perfectly acceptable emoticon systems beforehand that were better than current emojis because they were customizable.

I disabled the emoji keyboard the first time it showed up and have never had it on since.

You can disable it. I did.

:) I've been using emojis since the 90s... ;)

Those are emoticons ;)

Emoji originally came from Docomo phones in Japan around 1999. (Or I think those were the first ones actually called "emoji"; some other earlier devices had similar character sets.)

emoticon != emoji

=^o_o^=

^_^

Ah the halcyon days of feelin' pompous for using random squigglies to convey emotion.

Still remember being scandalized by the flip table emoticon using characters I couldn't find on my keyboard. So jealous I had to ...

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

well, not that actually. just paste, I guess.

Those are rather kaomojis, though.