On: Apple announces Self Service Repair

[cpmsmith]

Not exactly – the "Homer Simpson" yellow emoji came after the initial (Apple) emoji font, which just had all the humans looking white, with no other options.

[userbinator → cpmsmith]

Long before non-Japanese started calling them "emoji", we had "smilies" and they were yellow.

[wellthisisgreat → userbinator]

This is accurate. https://mymodernmet.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/smiley...

[ectopod → userbinator]

Yes. PhpBB and my Nokia feature phone have had yellow smilies since before iPhones were a thing.

[tomjakubowski → cpmsmith]

This is untrue. Not that any of them look like Simpsons characters, but the only emoji option on iOS for like five years was the yellow-shaded cartoon face. It's still the default skin tone in most emoji sets.

https://emojipedia.org/emoji-1.0/

[cpmsmith → tomjakubowski]

The cartoon faces have always been yellow, but the human ones, e.g. hands or gendered faces, were not until 2015 (on iOS). https://emojipedia.org/apple/iphone-os-2.2/

There was a lot of discourse about it at the time. https://www.fastcompany.com/3016256/are-emojis-racist

[nostromo → cpmsmith]

This is false. The first emojis were Japanese in origin and were the first to use yellow faces. Apple copied the existing style from the Japanese illustrations.