4 ms·

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 be

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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
  - Zak 8mo ago
    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.
    - philistine 8mo ago
      Hazehover is a new rising superstar. It darkens the unfocused app windows. So I guess it's a dark star ;)
      - butlike 8mo ago
        I tried hazeover years ago and dropped it quite quickly. Something about the dimming caused visual confusion for me.
- conductr 8mo ago
  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
  - Zak 8mo ago
    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.
nancyminusone 8mo ago
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.
- post-it 8mo ago
  Don't forget cursor customizers!
- lelanthran 8mo ago
  Smileys were something else (pure acid, like this :-)). ISTR the brief time you mention calling these things emoticons.
  - bityard 8mo ago
    You have it backwards, sir, :-) are the emoticons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons
  - badc0ffee 8mo ago
    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.
    - allenu 8mo ago
      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.
    - 8mo ago
paulddraper 8mo ago
So Apple worked with emoji, or didn't?
WalterBright 8mo ago
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.
- drw85 8mo ago
  I just think there are far too many. Sometimes I just want to add a happy face and there are 500 variations. Then I find one which I think looks happy and hover over it for a second and the tooltip says “shivering anxious constipated”.
aaron695 8mo ago
[dead]
rpdillon 8mo ago
Apple does tend to drag their feet a bit, though. If I recall correctly, it took two years for them to add cut and paste to iOS.

bombcar 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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 8mo 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.
- Zak 8mo ago
  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.
  - philistine 8mo ago
    Hazehover is a new rising superstar. It darkens the unfocused app windows. So I guess it's a dark star ;)
    - butlike 8mo ago
      I tried hazeover years ago and dropped it quite quickly. Something about the dimming caused visual confusion for me.
conductr 8mo ago
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
- Zak 8mo ago
  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.

nancyminusone 8mo ago

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.

post-it 8mo ago
Don't forget cursor customizers!
lelanthran 8mo ago
Smileys were something else (pure acid, like this :-)). ISTR the brief time you mention calling these things emoticons.
- bityard 8mo ago
  You have it backwards, sir, :-) are the emoticons: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emoticons
- badc0ffee 8mo ago
  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.
  - allenu 8mo ago
    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.
  - 8mo ago

paulddraper 8mo ago

So Apple worked with emoji, or didn't?

WalterBright 8mo ago

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.

drw85 8mo ago
I just think there are far too many. Sometimes I just want to add a happy face and there are 500 variations. Then I find one which I think looks happy and hover over it for a second and the tooltip says “shivering anxious constipated”.

aaron695 8mo ago

[dead]

rpdillon 8mo ago

Apple does tend to drag their feet a bit, though. If I recall correctly, it took two years for them to add cut and paste to iOS.