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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

The thing is, emojis were being used (appeared in the 90s), and spreading (how many people used various tricks and hacks to "unlock" emojis in older iOS versions despite not being in Japan?), so the unicode consortium could either standardise it, or see the number of proprietary extensions increase further and less and less people give a flying fuck about their registry.

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    so the unicode consortium could either standardise it, 
    or see the number of proprietary extensions increase 
    further and less and less people give a flying fuck 
    about their registry.

I'd say:

    so the unicode consortium could either standardise it, 
    or see the emoji fad disappear as quickly as it appeared.

Admittedly I don't know much about the situation in Japan or in other countries where emoji became popular in the 90s, but I'm curious.

In particular I have no clue how popular they really were (only youth phenomenon?) and how many people somehow depended on them. In English or German you can get along quite well without emoji. Maybe communication in other languages depends more heavily on emoji because emotions can't be expressed concisely? Or is there another reason why they became popular in Japan first.

You might have a point, but why would, for instance, iOS uses its own proprietary emojis if everybody that has Android cannot see them?

Why not? But you certainly don't have to trust me on that: it's what actually happened. Apple added support for Softbank (unicode-based) emoji when they started working on japan, and non-japanese started using that even though it only worked between iOS devices[0] (didn't even work on OSX IIRC). Hell iOS has its own proprietary messaging system and people use that.

[0] it actually required "unlocking" the relevant keyboard by starting an application which used those characters or something like that, shit was crazy, it took several ios versions for apple to make the emoji keyboard available to any and all OOTB

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