Should I drink a glass of empty square box on this plane? Or perhaps flip someone I don't like the empty square box?
Both Google and Android phone makers have dropped the ball on emoji, and it's threatening to break what should be a worldwide standard.
I'm a fan of emoji; as I've said before, they enhance rather than injure text communication. They're also a standard done the right way. Rather than being a proprietary, single-platform extension, they're arbitrated by the Unicode Consortium, a broad industry group including Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. Emoji should be completely interoperable and have no platform lock-in.
Except they aren't interoperable at the moment, because the Android ecosystem is dragging its feet. Unicode 7.0 emoji were released in June 2014. They were pretty quickly adopted by Windows 10, and then showed up on the LG G4, of all things. LG's implementation is important because it shows that Android OEMs don't have to wait for Google (and in fact, most OEMs have their own emoji character sets.)
Everything stayed pretty low key until about a month ago, when Apple implemented a lot of Unicode 7 and Unicode 8 emoji in iOS 9.1. The iPhone is the single most popular smartphone in the world, and Apple loves to perpetrate platform lock-in, as is shown by its vile, proprietary iMessage system.
So pretty immediately, all of us Android users started to see texts and Tweets from iOS users with funny little square boxes in them. That's the sign of a missing emoji—and whether it's the champagne glass, the middle finger, or the unicorn, we were losing the plot.
Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google's head of Android engineering, seemed to hint that Google was caught a bit off guard by the popularity of the new pictures. In an Oct. 22 tweet which is still the sum total of everything Google has said on the issue, he said "we're on it," and "sorry." I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, so I waited a few weeks before writing about this, but when I asked Google more recently, it just pointed me to that tweet.
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So we have no idea when the update is coming. It's even unclear whether the emoji will come in an update to the Google Keyboard or something else updateable through Google Play Services, or through a full point update of the Android OS. That's very important because U.S. wireless carriers tend to take months to approve Android OS point updates, meaning that if Google clears the character sets that way, it could be a long time before most U.S. phone owners can see them. Google has been modularizing a lot of functions through Google Play Services, though, and if it can sneak the emojis in that way, they would come much more quickly.
Implementing the new emoji is important because interoperability is key to communication. We don't need more widely separated Apple and Android social classes, with iOS users incomprehensible to their often lower-budget Android friends and relations. If Google doesn't step up, then phone makers should, to keep us all able to talk in pictures with each other.
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