I really detest how much people are messing with Unicode standards. So much room for misinterpretation as people send emojis that look totally different on their phone as compared to what shows up on the recipient's phone.
One of the reasons that putting Emoji into the Unicode character set is silly is that anyone is free to use/make their own font to render them however they want. If the meaning of a message changes because of the font being used, then the sender (and, by proxy, their OS's developers) shouldn't have used text for such things in the first place.
Making short-sighted engineering decisions doesn't give anyone leverage to dictate how I display text on my devices.
On a related note, the whole business around "racist" or "sexist" emoji is just as ridiculous. Unicode dictates things like "Construction Worker"; if you want that to display as male, female, black, white, cat, dog, alien or whatever then just select an appropriate font (or blame the OS/font developer for gender/race bias). The answer is not to add white-male-construction-worker, black-male-construction-worker, white-female-construction-worker, etc.
The idea of race/gender modifiers is better, but at that point you might as well make a paint program with a colour picker and a "flood fill" tool.
> anyone is free to use/make their own font to render them however they want
Yes, and you could make a font to render the "a" character as "g". It doesn't mean that the Man is oppressing Apple by making them render "a" as "a" in their devices, and neither is Apple free to render any letter as any other, as they see fit. Standards are standards for that exact reason, and that's what Unicode is.
Apple is rendering the gun symbol as a gun. That's very different from rendering the letter "a" as the letter "g", which are distinct symbols.
Plus the fact that the only 'meaning' of characters like "a", "g", etc. is to represent themselves as distinguished from the other characters (which is taken to its logical conclusion in binary: each symbol represents itself as distinguished from the other one). Hence replacing an "a" with a "g" is to entirely replace the complete meaning of the symbol.
What Apple's done may, possibly, somewhat change some of the, already ambiguous, meaning of the gun symbol.
BTW, I wasn't trying to imply that Apple may be 'oppressed' by "the Man". I just don't want to see a future change to the Unicode standard mandating that particular symbols be rendered into particular arrangements of pixels, which I could certainly imagine the likes of Apple et al pushing for in order to work around their self-induced problems.
No, I saw, but that didn't help my confusion at all. The shaded heart looks very obviously like someone had to dither shading into a 1-bit drawing, but the Google icon is just surreal. I can only imagine it being a practical joke.
It isn't messing with Unicode to introduce new characters, I'm afraid. Language and communication tools evolve over time, and people clearly enjoy communicating using emoji, so itnseems natural that standardisation is a sensible approach.
