Google ( and ) Google's
Noto fonts project includes the Noto Color Emoji font, which supplies color glyphs for emoji characters.
ChromeOS, through its inclusion of the Noto fonts, supports the emoji set introduced through Unicode 6.2. As of ChromeOS 41, Noto Color Emoji is the default font for most emoji.
Android devices support emoji differently depending on the operating system version. Google added native emoji support to Android in July 2013 with Android 4.3, and to the Google Keyboard in November 2013 for devices running Android 4.4 and later. Android 7.0 Nougat added Unicode 9 emoji, skin tone modifiers, and a redesign of many existing emoji. Emoji are also supported by the
Google Hangouts application (independent of the keyboard in use), in both Hangouts and
SMS modes. Several third-party messaging and keyboard applications (such as IQQI Keyboard) for Android devices provide plugins that allow the use of emoji. With Android 8 (Oreo), Google added a compatibility library that, if included by app developers, makes the latest Noto emoji available on any platform since Android 4.3. Stock Android systems include the Noto glyphs for emoji characters, although individual social media apps may use their own glyphs instead. However, mobile phone vendors HTC and LG deployed variants of NotoColorEmoji.ttf with custom glyphs prior to 2017, and Samsung still does. Some Japanese mobile carriers used to equip branded Android devices with emoji glyphs that were closer to the original ones, but apparently have stopped updating these circa 2015.
Apple Apple first introduced emoji to their desktop operating system with the release of
OS X 10.7 Lion, in 2011. Users can view emoji characters sent through email and messaging applications, which are commonly shared by mobile users, as well as any other application. Users can create emoji symbols using the "Characters" special input panel from almost any native application by selecting the "Edit" menu and pulling down to "Special Characters", or by the key combination . Users can also create these symbols by switching the keyboard to Unicode, holding and typing the Unicode hex input. For example, holding down would create ☺. The desktop OS uses the
Apple Color Emoji font that was introduced earlier in
iOS. This provides users with full color pictographs. The emoji keyboard was first available in Japan with the release of
iPhone OS version 2.2 in 2008. The emoji keyboard was not officially made available outside of Japan until
iOS version 5.0. From iPhone OS 2.2 through to iOS 4.3.5 (2011), those outside Japan could access the keyboard but had to use a third-party app to enable it. The first of such apps was developed by
Josh Gare; the emoji beginning to be embraced by popular culture outside Japan has been attributed to these apps. iOS was updated to support
Fitzpatrick skin-tone modifiers with version 8.3.
OS X 10.9 Mavericks introduced a dedicated emoji input palette in most text input boxes within the Mac's existing Character Viewer using the key combination . Optionally, the key alone can be specified by the user in the keyboard preferences menu to bring up the Character Viewer. Since
macOS Big Sur, the key is also labeled as (globe) for consistency across macOS and
iOS, which uses the globe key as a function key to switch to the emoji and other chosen international keyboard layouts. Apple has revealed that the "face with tears of joy" is the most popular emoji among English-speaking Americans. On second place is the "heart" emoji followed by the "Loudly Crying Face". On July 17, 2018, for the
World Emoji Day, Apple announced that it will be adding 70 more emoji in its 2018
iOS update, including the long-awaited, red hair, white hair, curly hair and bald emoji. On September 12, 2017, Apple announced that the
Messages app on the
iPhones with
Face ID would get "Animoji", which are versions of standard emoji that are custom-animated with the use of
facial motion capture to reflect the sender's expressions. These Animoji can also utilize
lip sync to appear to speak audio messages recorded by the sender. Apple had created 3D models of all standard emoji prior to its late-2016 OS updates from which the static default 2D graphics had been rendered. A select set of these models is being reused for creating still images and short animations dynamically. With the release of
iOS 12, Apple introduced "Memoji" that allows the use of an avatar that a user can use to personalize messages; this feature does not require Face ID. With the release of
iOS 13.2, Apple introduced over 70 new emojis, with
gender neutral options, people holding hands with various skin tones, as well as full Unicode 12 and Unicode 12.1 emoji support. On release of
iOS 14.5, over 100 new emojis are introduced. With the release of
iOS 15.4, Apple introduced new emojis, implementing Unicode 14 emoji recommendations. Release of
iOS 16.4 added Unicode 15 emoji. Release of
iOS 17.4 added Unicode 15.1 emoji. Emojis from
iOS are added to the
macOS version released at the same time as the iOS version.
Mozilla (Firefox and Firefox OS) As part of the now-discontinued
Firefox OS project,
Mozilla developed an emoji font named FxEmojis. Mozilla also packages a version of Twitter's Twemoji font converted to a COLR/CPAL layered format font, named "Twemoji Mozilla". Older versions of the latter Mozilla project instead packaged the EmojiOne font, as "EmojiOne Mozilla". Since
Firefox 50, emojis are rendered by the browser when the underlying platform lacks native support.
Linux Ubuntu 18.04 and
Fedora 28 support color emoji by default, using
Noto Color Emoji. Some
Linux distributions require the installation of extra fonts. Color emoji are supported by
FreeType and
Cairo.
Microsoft Windows An update for
Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 brought a subset of the monochrome Unicode set to those operating systems as part of the
Segoe UI Symbol font. As of
Windows 8.1 Preview, the
Segoe UI Emoji font is included, which supplies full-color pictographs. The plain Segoe UI font lacks emoji characters, whereas Segoe UI Symbol and Segoe UI Emoji include them. Emoji characters are accessed through the onscreen keyboard's key, or through the physical keyboard shortcut . Unlike macOS and iOS, color glyphs are only supplied when the application supports Microsoft's
DirectWrite API, and Segoe UI Emoji is explicitly declared, otherwise monochrome glyphs appear. Microsoft's COLR/CPAL format for multi-color fonts such as Segoe UI Emoji is supported by the current versions of several web browsers on Windows (including
Firefox,
Google Chrome,
Internet Explorer and
Microsoft Edge), but not by many graphics applications. In August 2022, Microsoft open-sourced more than 1,500 of its 3D
emoji to let creators remix and customize them. The library is available on
Figma and
GitHub. Released in November 2023, update
KB5032190 for
Windows 11 22H2 added Unicode 15 emoji. However, they are missing from the final 22H2 version of Windows 10 since introduction of Unicode 12. Unlike other desktop operating systems which render country flag emojis as colorful graphics, Microsoft Windows as of 2025 displays them as black-and-white two-letter
ISO country codes (e.g., "US" for 🇺🇸). This decision, attributed to
geopolitical sensitivities has drawn criticism for inconsistent emoji support across platforms. Despite updates like
Windows 11 24H2, country flags remain unsupported.
Social media platforms Facebook and
Twitter replace all Unicode emoji used on their websites with their own custom graphics. Prior to October 2017, Facebook had different sets for the main site and for its
Messenger service, where only the former provided complete coverage. Messenger now uses Apple emoji on iOS, and the main Facebook set elsewhere.
Facebook reactions are only partially compatible with standard emoji. Twitter has released Twemoji, which is their emoji graphics together with a JavaScript library to handle them, under the
Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 license and the
MIT open-source license, respectively. Despite this, the Android and iOS Twitter apps use the emoji graphics that are native to the platform they are running on (Apple and Google), instead of the Twemoji graphics.
Other emoji font vendors emoji EmojiOne version 2.2, an open-source font available under a
free content license, supports the full emoji set in color through Unicode Emoji 3.0, i.e. Unicode 9.0. Newer versions of EmojiOne, since renamed JoyPixels, support more recent Unicode Emoji versions, and use a stricter license that disallows the redistribution of vector images, while version 2.x is "no longer supported or distributed". EmojiTwo, an open-source fork of EmojiOne 2.2, aims to add all emoji from 2017 and later. The font
Symbola contains all emoji through version 10.0 as normal monochrome glyphs. Through version 10, Symbola was made available
without a license nor any restrictions on use; beginning with version 11 in 2018, Symbola has been copyrighted with a ban on commercial use and derivative works. Other typefaces including a significant number of emoji characters include
Noto Emoji, Adobe Source Emoji, and Quivira. ==Footnotes==