Seems like one big simplification would be to make a bunch of base “characters” (face, poo, dog, etc) and a bunch of combining characters (smiling, frowning, crying etc).
At least they mention that emojis exist in unicode to make compatibility with text encoded on japanese phones.
I suppose the reason why Apple followed Softbank reference images and not KDDI or DoCoMo (last one would probably have been the closest to an authority on the matter, yet not mentioned) is because iPhones were originally released only on Softbank in Japan, and emoji were a originally a japan-only feature on the iPhone.
Why would they follow KDDIs reference images when emoji was a feature for Softbank costumers?
This isn't a meaningful observation or anything, but you used both "emojis" and "emoji" as the plural of "emoji". My brain tripped over that for some reason.
At first I thought maybe it was just autocorrect, but after rereading my comment a few times, I think I was thinking of emojis as a series of images in one paragraph and as a concept in another, hence the lack of plural S for the concept
the obvious solution imo is to add an emotional modifier as with the skin tone modifier
that would allow essentially any emoji object to be assigned emotions, sad car needs repairs, angry envelope is a bill, etc
but then the same question, where does it end, are we trying to replace the whole range of actual language with likely ambiguous pictographs? what is the purpose of emoji?
The current crop could be precomposed characters.
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