5 ms·

It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard

162 points by tobr 7mo ago

suddenlybananas 7mo ago
Why didn't Apple want emoji enabled?
- wildzzz 7mo ago
  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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7mo ago
  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.
- junofan 7mo ago
  They were in Softbank’s private use area, so no interop story really.
UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago
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.
- bombcar 7mo ago
  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?
  - mikkupikku 7mo ago
    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.
    - bombcar 7mo ago
      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.
- Zak 7mo ago
  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.
  - ryandrake 7mo ago
    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.
comrade1234 7mo ago
:) I've been using emojis since the 90s... ;)
- NoSalt 7mo ago
  emoticon != emoji
  - inanutshellus 7mo ago
    =^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.
    - layer8 7mo ago
      Those are rather kaomojis, though.
- fenomas 7mo ago
  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.)
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
Cockbrand 7mo ago
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.
- asdff 7mo ago
  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.
  - NetMageSCW 7mo ago
    Cydia and jail breaking replaced hacking HP calculators for a few years for me.
  - RulerOf 7mo ago
    I remember watching a video of a guy doing that to a display phone at an Apple Store. While that action was definitely not a good idea, it did encapsulate just how polished that jailbreak[1] was. The UX was identical to an App Store install page of the day. You tapped the price "FREE" and then tapped "INSTALL" and the phone would appear to install Cydia as though you had just used the App Store to do it. [1]: https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Saffron https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Saffron
dilap 7mo ago
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.
Nevermark 7mo ago
> 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!
- myhf 7mo ago
  [flagged]
esafak 7mo ago
Do emojis enrich communication, or debase it? Why not use words, with precise meanings? Emojis are prevarication.
- something765478 7mo ago
  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.
  - esafak 7mo ago
    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.
    - egypturnash 7mo ago
      How do you feel about plaintext smilies? People were doing those long before emoji existed. :) :p :D
      - esafak 7mo ago
        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.
    - WorldMaker 7mo ago
      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.
xd1936 7mo ago
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 https://www.webos-internals.org/wiki/Getting_started
- BoorishBears 7mo ago
  The best mobile OS we ever got, years ahead of its time, doomed by circumstances. The early (modern) smartphone days were something else
arcfour 7mo ago
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.
seba_dos1 7mo ago
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.
jamesnorden 7mo ago
I'm confused as to why apps were able to edit this file.
- leoh 7mo ago
  Agreed
- TazeTSchnitzel 7mo ago
  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.
  - krackers 7mo ago
    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/ac90ef6e1ac817b45ef50f9bcf5719a6956d955c/Classes/EmojiEnablerAppDelegate.m https://github.com/lilyball/emojienabler/blob/ac90ef6e1ac817...
sph 7mo ago
Throwback to the days HN had emojis: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3547056
- OptionOfT 7mo ago
  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!
- YesBox 7mo ago
  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
avazhi 7mo ago
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.

162 points by tobr 7mo ago

suddenlybananas 7mo ago

Why didn't Apple want emoji enabled?

wildzzz 7mo ago
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.
TazeTSchnitzel 7mo ago
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.
junofan 7mo ago
They were in Softbank’s private use area, so no interop story really.

UqWBcuFx6NV4r 7mo ago

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.

bombcar 7mo ago
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?
- mikkupikku 7mo ago
  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.
  - bombcar 7mo ago
    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.
Zak 7mo ago
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.
- ryandrake 7mo ago
  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.

comrade1234 7mo ago

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

NoSalt 7mo ago
emoticon != emoji
- inanutshellus 7mo ago
  =^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.
  - layer8 7mo ago
    Those are rather kaomojis, though.
fenomas 7mo ago
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.)
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]

Cockbrand 7mo ago

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.

asdff 7mo ago
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.
- NetMageSCW 7mo ago
  Cydia and jail breaking replaced hacking HP calculators for a few years for me.
- RulerOf 7mo ago
  I remember watching a video of a guy doing that to a display phone at an Apple Store. While that action was definitely not a good idea, it did encapsulate just how polished that jailbreak[1] was. The UX was identical to an App Store install page of the day. You tapped the price "FREE" and then tapped "INSTALL" and the phone would appear to install Cydia as though you had just used the App Store to do it. [1]: https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Saffron https://theapplewiki.com/wiki/Saffron

dilap 7mo ago

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.

Nevermark 7mo ago

> 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!

myhf 7mo ago
[flagged]

esafak 7mo ago

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

something765478 7mo ago
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.
- esafak 7mo ago
  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.
  - egypturnash 7mo ago
    How do you feel about plaintext smilies? People were doing those long before emoji existed. :) :p :D
    - esafak 7mo ago
      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.
  - WorldMaker 7mo ago
    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.

xd1936 7mo ago

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

BoorishBears 7mo ago
The best mobile OS we ever got, years ahead of its time, doomed by circumstances. The early (modern) smartphone days were something else

arcfour 7mo ago

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.

seba_dos1 7mo ago

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.

jamesnorden 7mo ago

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

leoh 7mo ago
Agreed
TazeTSchnitzel 7mo ago
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.
- krackers 7mo ago
  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/ac90ef6e1ac817b45ef50f9bcf5719a6956d955c/Classes/EmojiEnablerAppDelegate.m https://github.com/lilyball/emojienabler/blob/ac90ef6e1ac817...

sph 7mo ago

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

OptionOfT 7mo ago
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!
YesBox 7mo ago
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

avazhi 7mo ago

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.