The good news, however: there are a ton of ways to change how your emoji appear on your phone using a number apps available for download on the Play Store. Emoji are baked into a phone’s font, and is just isn’t feasible to change your emoji through the system font. First, the bad: without rooting your phone-an increasingly difficult proposition for most mainstream Android phones-you can’t change your phone’s emoji at a system level.

In this case, we have both good news and bad news. And while some work has been done by Google and other companies to have their appearances look closer to standard emoji on other platforms, after a while, it can be pretty frustrating to constantly have to explain how you’re really feeling after an emoji sends the wrong message. This can create difficulty when communicating with emoji-back in earlier versions of Android, some emoji characters like grimacing or disappointed, looked entirely different than their iPhone or Samsung counterparts. But not every emoji is created equal-some of the artwork created by certain companies simply don’t match what the “standard” emoji artwork should look like. In theory, this should be fine: you send your phone’s version of a smiling emoji to one person, and even though they see it in their own phone’s design language, it’s still a smiling emoji. There’s one major problem with emoji: although Unicode, a standard number system for most computer systems to understand, allow for all phones and computing devices to understand specific emoji, almost every major tech player-be it Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, or even Twitter-have created their own custom emoji art. Among certain communities, some emoji even gained additional meaning and context through its usage.

Like the emoticons of yesteryear, emoji grew in popularity among teens and college students, establishing themselves as a form of online and mobile communication present right alongside-and sometimes without-text. Once it was included by default in all versions of iOS, emoji quickly became a way to communicate not just words and numbers through a text message, but emotions. Though originating in Japan in the late 1990s and early 2000s, emoji didn’t grow popular as a form of communication in the United States and Europe until they were included in iOS 5.0 in late 2011.

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