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Comment by saghm | Hacker News Reader

Personally, I find it kind of ridiculous that new emojis are considered flagship features of mobile OS updates. I'd think that it would be possible to decouple emoji updates from kernel/security updates, so I imagine that Android/iOS tie them to the OS updates solely as a way to motivate non-technical users to update.

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I suspect it's probably just that "by the time we realised this would be important it was too hard to change it" rather than anything sinister. Though I wish they would pull them out so I can swap or update them externally to software.

"All current iOS emoji will now work on my phone" was genuinely a highlight of the Nougat update for my Galaxy S7 .

Android actually recently released a support library that apps can implement for this.

https://developer.android.com/guide/topics/ui/look-and-feel/...

Mobile OS's aren't just for grumpy old people.

I'm younger than emojis themselves, to be perfectly honest, but I hardly think that an (incorrect) ad hominem makes my point any less valid.

Emojis have no relevance to how technical someone is

Exactly, they have appeal to people independent of technical skill; hence my hypothesis that they make sure to emphasize the things that are more likely to resonate with larger groups of people (like emoji) rather than things like Project Treble or a "native C/C++ API for high-performance audio", even if the former really have little to due with the OS itself.

If we're going down that route, it's also worth noting that "old people" such as GP referred to also can like emoji; my parents and grandparents enjoy using emoji.

GP's point wasn't that emojis shouldn't be updated, but that it shouldn't require MAJOR/BREAKING VERSION updates (kernel, libraries, the works) to simply update a sprite font.

Who is saying it does? They are just releasing them at the same time.

I don't think they're retroactively releasing them for versions of Android prior to Oreo, though, are they?

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