The Convergence of Emoji ⇥ medium.com

Great post from Sebastiaan de With on the evolution of emoji on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone:

Significant design differences in emoji can be a hassle at best, but at worst it completely alters the meaning of a communication, and creates a jarring disconnect between the intended meaning the sender is trying to convey to the recipient. Imagine if the letters of our latin script varied depending on the phone you used!

The development of the Latin alphabet occurred over the span of thousands of years. We’re seeing a minor subset of that take place in real time, comparatively speaking. That’s absolutely fascinating to me.