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What took iPhone emoji search so long?
Every year, the chant gets louder:
oh that’s cool Apple that you added all this stuff but WHERE IS MY EMOJI SEARCH
This year, people are going to have to come up with a new request, because emoji search is coming to iOS 14.
So what the heck took Apple so long?
Emoji search seems so obvious, did Apple just forget to implement it? Did they not know people wanted this?
Here I piece together the most likely reasons this took so long. It’s probably not just one, but a bit of each of them.
(Oh, and if you’re new to my rarely-update-blog here, you can usually find me over at Emojipedia.)
1. 🗓 Timing
The emoji keyboard first came to the iPhone twelve years ago in iPhone OS 2.2.
It took until 2011 for widespread access to this keyboard in iOS, and wasn’t until 2016 that it became clear that frequent emoji updates may be a real thing.
In the early years, there wasn’t much change in the emoji set. iOS 8.3 in 2015 nearly doubled the set, and by the following year it was clear that updates were coming consistently year-on-year.
This isn’t much of an excuse so much as to reframe our minds. It feels like emojis have been huge and growing in number forever but we’re talking more likely 4-5 years here.
2. 🙅 Apple just isn’t good at search
Search isn’t Apple’s forte. Siri and App Store search come to mind as examples that you just don’t have faith when you say or type a phrase, that you’ll get a great result.
You might, but you wouldn’t want to bet your life on it.
It seems reasonable that Apple knows its strengths, and has avoided doing emoji search until it could do a decent job.
Apple has emoji search on the Mac. It’s existed for years. And it has gotten worse over time.
Something happened in 2016 which caused the previously inflexible-yet-consistent emoji search to broaden and accept more terms, but with far less pleasing results.
The good news? Emoji search in macOS Big Sur has improved. It’s also decent in iOS 14 beta.
It felt like in 2016-2019, Apple’s macOS emoji search was either too complex and buggy to fix, and now replaced. Or it has finally been improved.
Whether these tweaks are implemented by hand (by checking the most common search phrases and fixing accordingly), or by natural language processing improvements, I’m not sure.
3. 🔡 Emoji Auto-Suggest
Apple has had emoji auto-suggest for a number of years on iOS.
You start typing a word, and an emoji might be suggested in the list of options. This works relatively well for a small set of results.
Issues with auto-suggest-as-emoji-search:
- If you’re already on the emoji keyboard and can’t find an emoji, you need to get back out of the emoji keyboard to try auto-suggest
- Only three results are shown at a time. If you have a big group of results like all green emojis, three isn’t enough
- If you don’t like the auto-suggest options you have to delete the word you just typed. Or you end up with a random word in your text.
Was emoji auto-suggest intended as the solution, so emoji search wasn’t needed at all? Did this delay the search feature? Maybe, but not necessarily.
Perhaps it was just a good place to get some data on what people are emoji searching for.
4. 😳 Public shaming
The first version of emoji auto-suggest on iOS only suggested one emoji. Damon Beres at Mashable noted the issue this presented, when searching for some terms.
Why should CEO show a man and not a woman?
Having only one auto-suggest option was always short-sighted, as it’s lose-lose no matter which gender is shown.
Apple rectified this in a subsequent release, by showing up to three choices.
Given the public and media interest in emoji, I doubt Apple wanted to roll out emoji search on iOS that was either buggy (ala Mac emoji search until now) or suggested bias (like the CEO auto-suggest option used to).
It’s one thing having bad search results on a relatively hidden feature on the Mac. It’s another to have them on a marquee feature of iOS.
Thankfully the emoji search results on iOS 14 beta are decent. Though they don’t make a particular point of which gender is shown first - it varies considerably, with no specific logic that is clear.
One failing here: you cannot press-and-hold any search result emoji to choose a different skin tone. The same limitation applies to the emoji auto-suggest feature.
5. UI Weirdness
One minor issue that may have deterred Apple from implementing emoji search earlier: it’s sometimes weird having a keyboard shown on screen that doesn’t actually type into your app.
If you accidentally find your way into the emoji search field, there is a new button in the lower-right hand corner to escape back to regular text entry. Or just tap where you want to type.
This same issue exists with third-party keyboards and iMessage apps like any GIF search. It seemed weirder at first, but now I think most users are familiar with a search-within-keyboard option.
As far as I can tell, there is no option to turn the emoji bar off.
Final notes
This is beta software, so I’m not going to review the specific functionality, but my initial notes are:
- ✅ Emoji search on iOS seems good, shows what an average user would expect.
- 💻 Compared to Catalina, the Big Sur results are much better. Every issue I raise in this earlier article has been addressed. A general test of other terms seems to show results that are universally better.
- 🤷 Sometimes the same search shows different results, I don’t know why
- 🔄 The search results are different to emoji auto-suggest. Typing ‘woman’ suggests 👩 in the auto-suggest bar, but gives a whole bunch of types of women in the search results, well ahead of the base ‘woman’ emoji.
- 🇬🇧 I performed my tests in English. I’m not sure how the iPhone emoji search performs in other languages.
Are you running iOS 14 beta and have you noticed any major emoji search issues? I’d be interested to know.
As far as I can tell, what Apple has implemented so far with iOS emoji search passes the ‘good enough to not notice anything special going on’ test.
Apple has created an “eye in speech bubble” emoji and nobody knows why
A mysterious new emoji has shown up in the developer previews of iOS 9.1 & OS X 10.11.1, and nobody knows what it is, or why it exists.
To a casual observer, this appears to be just another emoji - one of many planned for the iOS 9.1 emoji update.
But the strange thing about this character (which Apple calls “eye in speech bubble”) is that it’s not a standard Unicode addition. It can’t be found in Unicode 1.1, or any other version right through to the Unicode 9.0 candidates.
This new emoji shows as a placeholder ellipsis on the emoji keyboard of the current iOS 9.1 developer preview:
Tapping and holding on this ellipsis gives away some of what is going on here - showing an eye, and a speech bubble. The emoji is created from joining these two standard Unicode characters together.
- Eye is an emoji approved in Unicode 7
- Left Speech Bubble was also approved in Unicode 7, but isn’t a standard addition recommended for emoji display
Combining these two characters with a Zero Width Joiner (ZWJ) results in the creation of the eye in speech bubble emoji.
A similar technique (using the ZWJ to create new emojis) is used by Apple for the range of family emojis. For exampls, the 👩👩👧 Family (Woman, Woman, Girl) emoji is a combination of these characters:
When displayed in-sequence, the result is a combined image showing two mothers and a daughter on supported platforms.
The difference between the use of ZWJs here is that the family emojis are well documented by Unicode.
By comparison, the eye in speech bubble emoji has not been suggested or recommended by Unicode, nor have I seen any mention of it prior to this update.
So…what’s going on? I asked around, and no-one seems to know. Ideas? I’d love to hear them.
Update 2015-09-29: Erik Veland has figured some of it out. When using OS X text-to-speech, this emoji is spoken as “Eye in speech bubble representing anti bullying campaign”. Is this to promote awareness, or does it have any associated functionality? Time will tell.
Update 2015-10-22: Robbie Gonzalez of Wired has the full details of this “I am a witness” anti-bullying campaign. A noble cause, but will this open the floodgates of campaigns lobbying Apple for custom ZWJ emoji sequences of their own? h/t Robert Hackett.
Emoji autosuggest on iOS. A quicker way to insert?
iOS seems to have a hidden feature which suggests an emoji to use, based on text that is entered.
The strange thing is, this seems to only suggest one emoji!
How to do it
- Type a sentence which ends in a period / full stop, followed by a space.
- Type the letter I. It will automatically capitalise.
- Type a space.
- Remove the space.
- The emoji for ℹ️ Information Source is suggested.
Does this happen for other emojis?
I asked around, and so far no-one has found examples of other emojis being autosuggested.
Windows Phone already auto-suggests emoji, and that’s a platform not known for great emoji support.
Could this be the start of a solution to long-held issues of finding the right emoji on iOS? I hope so.
There has been a lot of chat about Apple changing their pistol emoji into a water pistol in the beta releases of iOS 10.
Amongst it all, CNN had me on to discuss the issues involved.
New emojis have been announced with a likely 2021 release. That’s before most people have the 2020 emojis, but such is the change to the schedule.
I went on The Morning Show to talk about it (the Australian TV show from Sydney, not the drama series on Apple TV+), and did an emoji quiz that I usually perform terribly at, but did surprisingly well for a change!
Incidentally, this is the first TV cross I’ve done from the boat. Plenty of radio has taken place, but TV I usually prefer wait til I can go in-studio to save any lag, but 2020 and all…
I recently attended UTC 157 hosted by Apple in Cupertino. On the emoji-front, most focus was given to Emoji 12.0 which is due for release in 2019, though there are already some candidates being shortlisted for 2020 including a pickup truck and capsicum.
I also must say that the work that has gone into Apple Park is stunning.
It’s World Emoji Day 2016, aka the day I realised I don’t know how to wear this type of cap.
What started a few years ago with me creating a Twitter account @WorldEmojiDay and posting “July 17 is #WorldEmojiDay” has grown to become in some ways as big as Emojipedia itself.
This year there’s a few more of us on board, and I decided a World Emoji Award would be fitting to be held on the day.
I find something both amusing and satisfying about Best New Emoji having nominees and a winner. My pick is for 🙃 upside-down face to take home the title, but that’s not looking promising right now.
Who knows where the day will go next year, but I hope to see these awards become a bigger part of the event in future years.
PS: Jonathan Mann of “Song a Day” fame wrote and performed the World Emoji Day Anthem for 2016 and it’s catchy as hell:
Have I reached my final emoji form?
Speaking with Sam from Wendover on his Half as Interesting channel about what’s in the guidelines for an emoji approval.
Various Volumes on iOS
Didn’t it make you mad loading this page and seeing the image up there with a giant volume control on top of it?
When watching videos on iOS — particularly iPhone — it’s inevitable you’ll have to change the volume at least once. And you know what that means: the giant rounded rect hovering over the exact content you are trying to view.
👎
In recent years, a sneaking trend has emerged with some apps replacing the system-wide volume HUD with a skinny slider at the top of the screen.
Here’s a selection that I have come across:
YouTube
Snapchat
Notes
- This UI appears only in full-screen apps that hide the status bar.
- YouTube shows a speaker icon for volume. The others imply it.
After using these apps for a while, it’s pretty jarring coming back to Facebook or Vine where a volume change hides content for what feels like forever.
In short:
Might be something for Apple to consider changing system-wide in iOS 11. It’s a great feature.
Appearance: Saturday Morning on Radio New Zealand
Talking with Kim Hill on RNZ from my narrowboat in the UK.
We touched on controversial emojis, exploding head horses, and having the longest introduction to any interview I’ve ever had.