Who Makes Emoji? Unicode, and Why They Look Different on Every Phone

Every year the news announces a few dozen new emoji. But who decides them? Apple? Google? And why does the same emoji look subtly different when sent from an iPhone and viewed on a Galaxy? This post traces an emoji’s journey from birth to being drawn on your screen.

What an emoji really is: a number, not a picture #

First, a misconception to clear up. When you send an emoji, no image file is transmitted. What travels is a number.

The computing world has a standard called Unicode that assigns a unique number to every character in every writing system. The letter “A” has one; so does every hangul syllable and every Chinese character. Emoji are registered in this same list, with exactly the same standing as letters. The smiling face is a “character” with its own number.

So sending an emoji amounts to sending the request “display the character with this number.” The receiving device looks up the number and draws the picture using its own font. That structure is the key to everything that follows.

Who makes them: review by the Unicode Consortium #

The authority to add emoji belongs not to any company but to the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit standards body. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and others participate as members, but decisions pass through committee review.

The fun fact: anyone can propose a new emoji. Passing, however, takes evidence — projected usage, proof that existing emoji cannot substitute, independence from brands and fads — all documented, with the road from review to release typically taking years. Several emoji in your keyboard today started as proposals from private individuals. Conversely, corporate logos are, as a rule, not accepted.

Why the same emoji looks different across devices #

Unicode defines the number, the name, and roughly the meaning — and stops there. “Grinning face” is standardized; how to draw that face belongs to each company. Apple renders the number with Apple’s emoji font, Samsung with Samsung’s, Google with Google’s.

The same emoji looking different on an iPhone and a Galaxy is therefore structure, not bug. Historically the gap was sometimes wide enough to cause real misunderstandings — one vendor drew a certain face as a broad happy grin while another drew it as an awkward gritted-teeth grimace, splitting the sender’s intent from the receiver’s reading. Vendors have been converging their designs in recent years, so the gap has narrowed considerably.

The family emoji’s secret: it is a combination #

Between family configurations, professions, and skin tones the combinations run into the thousands — numbering each one would have blown up the list. Instead, Unicode uses a clever mechanism: joining.

• The family emoji is several adult and child emoji glued together with an invisible “connector character.” A device that understands the sequence draws them as one family portrait; an old device that does not shows adult, adult, child separately.
• Skin tones work by appending a tone-modifier character to a base emoji: hand + tone modifier renders as a hand of that tone.
• Some profession emoji are “person + tool” combinations — person plus computer renders as a developer.

Like Lego bricks: a modest set of pieces combined into diversity.

Why you see empty boxes (□) #

If an emoji from a friend ever showed up on your phone as an empty box or a question mark, you can now deduce the cause. Emoji travel as numbers and are drawn by your device’s font. If your font does not know that number, it cannot draw it — the box is the font’s way of saying “there’s a character here, but I can’t render it.”

New emoji arrive yearly, but your phone’s font updates only with OS updates. A friend on a brand-new phone sends a just-released emoji, and your not-yet-updated phone shows a box. It is also why new emoji become usable months after they are announced: each vendor has to draw the artwork and ship it inside an OS update.

Summary #

• An emoji is not an image file but a number registered in Unicode. The number travels; the receiving device’s font draws the picture.
• New emoji are decided by Unicode Consortium review. Anyone can propose one, but must prove demand and irreplaceability.
• The standard fixes only number and meaning, so every vendor draws its own artwork — which is why iPhone and Galaxy render differently.
• Family, profession, and skin-tone emoji are base emoji joined by invisible characters; old devices showing them as separate pieces is the proof.
• An empty box means your device’s font does not know the number yet. OS updates are the delivery trucks for new emoji.