
Apple won't approve apps that use emojis that aren't provided by the keyboard - JamieF1
https://twitter.com/Sam0711er/status/958793819495059460
======
geoffpado
It seemed later in the week that this got turned around:
[https://twitter.com/Sam0711er/status/961312320537415681](https://twitter.com/Sam0711er/status/961312320537415681)

~~~
dTal
The practical upshot of such a policy would be everyone shipping their own
fonts instead of using Apple's system fonts, just to be safe. This would be
nothing but trouble - bloated app sizes, more ram pressure, uneven look and
feel, and diminished influence on Unicode.

A now-deleted tweet by a different developer facing the same issue stated that
Apple apparently clarified by saying that using emoji as "media" was
forbidden, but "content" was okay. Whatever that means.

Between this and the gun/water pistol thing, it really seems like Apple thinks
of Unicode as their personal playground, and simply do not think through the
network effects of their policies at all.

~~~
trevyn
> _Apple thinks of Unicode as their personal playground_

Apple has thought of Earth as their personal playground for a long time;
arrogance runs deep in their company culture. Steve could get away with it
because he was arrogant and _right_ most of the time. Today, ancient &
obsolete arrogance is Apple’s biggest flaw, and is causing them to drift more
and more out of touch with reality.

~~~
gregknicholson
Apple seems to avoid interoperability wherever they think they can get away
with it.

Even in really weird ways, like: to install any software on your Apple phone
you had to use Apple's _music player_. (Is that right? I never owned one, and
it sounds daft, but plausible for Apple.)

Text and video messaging was low-hanging fruit, thanks to XMPP etc not taking
off. With that network effect in place, it's a short leap towards a subtly-
incompatible text format, so buying Apple's stuff becomes the path of slightly
less resistance.

I don't know whether this is an aggressive strategy; or whether they care only
about their customers' satisfaction and not at all about interoperability.

~~~
earenndil
> to install any software on your Apple phone you had to use Apple's _music
> player_

Uh...no? Not sure where you got that from.

------
princekolt
Apple's Emoji designs are copyrighted to Apple. The unicode standard only
defines character codes, and what they should "generally" look like (hell,
Unicode's own example designs are monochrome line drawings). So this makes
complete sense. If people started using Apple's logos on the App's UI, they
would respond in exactly the same way.

And if they're so invested in using emojis as a "key marketing strategy", why
didn't they pay an artist to create emojis for their own use?

~~~
pavlov
IMO you’ve been unfairly downvoted, as you’re correct that the emoji
illustrations indeed are owned by Apple.

The fault lies with the Unicode consortium for opening this can of worms. The
standard should have been reserved for outline letter forms only. Adding a set
of full-color illustrations that expands every year was madness.

It’s especially bad for embedded devices that need to render text. It used to
be that you could ship vector fonts for the major global scripts in less than
500k, and you could feel fairly confident that new glyphs aren’t randomly
added.

Today you need to ship an emoji font and make sure that your font engine can
render color graphics. Google offers the only semi-decent free color emoji
font, and it weighs about 7 MB. That’s a vexing increase in system font
footprint just so that there’s a poop illustration on disk when needed. You
also need to update the set every year when the standard adds “depressed poop”
or “sulking lizardman” or whatever.

From a UX point of view, it sucks because the free emoji font doesn’t look
like the Apple one (because that look is copyrighted!), and inevitably someone
will complain about it.

At least HN has the good sense to filter the emoji junk from comments.

~~~
jrockway
> Today you need to ship an emoji font and make sure that your font engine can
> render color graphics.

It seems like it goes even deeper than that. I've been noticing things like
<face><unicode female symbol> that I thought was some sort of meme that I just
didn't get. It turns out, that's how "older devices" (the latest version of
Chrome in my case) renders the new emoji that you can attach a gender to.

I agree that it all kind of went off the deep end. You can easily come up with
an infinite number of pictures that you might want to attach to a text
message, but there aren't an infinite number of codepoints. So the race to add
emoji will never end, and it will never be possibly to satisfy everyone. I
would have just given up. At least I can include a picture of a tanabata tree
with any and all text!

------
kazinator
> _Means if your app displays emoji anywhere without a user having it typed
> in, it’s illegal and will be rejected._

How does that work in a chat app, when the remote user has typed that in on
their device?

~~~
egypturnash
Presumably a remote user is still a user.

My inner rules lawyer does note that this could pose a problem for any bot
that emits emoji...

~~~
nsxwolf
A bot user is still a user. Maybe.

------
kevin_b_er
Your key takeaway: System fonts may no longer be used in your iOS application
without checking with Apple first.

------
amadeusw
What's the rationale behind this? Also, can someone explain me why Slack
forces Google-themed emojis? I personally like the Windows design with black
stroke

~~~
threeseed
One possible reason is for accessibility (VoiceOver) and i18n.

~~~
couchand
That doesn't make sense. It's a unicode code point, after all, the rendering
is immaterial.

------
gruez
>We’ll therefore have to remove all emojis from @getBittracker and resubmit a
new version. This will remove the “young” feeling in the app and basically
destroys one of our key marketing strategies.

good.

------
im3w1l
Can someone give some more context for this? What exactly did they do?

------
msie
Sadly, Apple can do whatever it wants. I can't imagine what can change Apple's
mind when it comes to stupid App policies. Truly frustrating.

