It’s very easy for people, especially younger people, to look at this with a 2026 understanding of the ubiquity of emoji and scoff at how ludicrous Apple was being. Things were very different. Drive-by Apple decriers will attribute anything possible to Steve Jobs’ vague “desire to control”. The reality is there were things he would obsess over and plenty he would let pass him by.
Emoji only made its way into Unicode in the 2010s. The past and present of text encoding, especially text message encoding, was/is a huge mess. I wouldn’t be running in guns blazing if I were them.
Anyone else remember the brief time in the mid 2000s that these were called "smileys" and damn near every webpage ad wanted to install a questionable IE 6 toolbar so you could "get more smileys"?
Quality kid memory for me. I also remember watching another kid click on an ad for a free ipod and then enter in his home address and other personal info.
The wikipedia entry for emoji is missing this entirely, but "smileys" were quite popular in various instant messaging apps (AOLIM, ICQ) and web forums. I was fairly sure they go back as far the mid or late 90's but I can't seem to find any hard evidence of that.
(I was into computers at the time but didn't see the point of IM apps or forums when IRC and Usenet already existed.)
A really cool feature of Windows Live Messenger (perhaps also MSN Messenger before it?) was you that smileys were viral. You could add your own, and people could right-click on the ones you used to copy them to their own collection.
It was great! And in MSN Messenger you could assign any string to be replaced by the smiley (which were basically any image including animated gifs) so some people’s writing was totally unreadable as letter or phrases were replaced with these images. Fun times
Yahoo Messenger had amazing fun animated smileys, and it was a fantastic Instant Messenger as well. Too bad Yahoo went to dogs, I was hoping Yahoo Messenger got bought out by Microsoft so that beautiful UI could be integrated as MS Office chat. Instead, Micro$oft acquired Skype, mainly for its VOIP ability, and it took years to integrate it into MS Office as MS Teams, which is a boring tool (but it is effective for video conferencing and basic chat purposes).
I miss those animated smileys.
Even WhatsApp and other popular social messaging platforms (Instagram, Signal, etc.) don't have them. Instead, we got GIFs (whose online gallery takes ages to load in WhatsApp, in recent months, at least on my phone) and animated stickers. sigh
IIRC "smileys" were what you got from fonts like Wingdings, and I believe those were short-lived. You could type :) and MS Word or Outlook, for example, would "helpfully" give you the Wingdings happy face, which would show up as a J for anyone who didn't have that font.
You're probably right about the terminology being around for a while, but I think most people just called them smileys (i.e. ;) would be called a "winking smiley"). I remember seeing the term used maybe in the early- or mid-90s either on a BBS or Usenet and thinking "Ah, that's what they're called" and as a nerd being annoyed that nobody used that term colloquially.
The obsession with control I find objectionable is not their decision not to enable emoji widely until support was stable. That's an obsession with polish, not control. The commitment to polish and self-restraint to not add features until they actually work well is something I've long appreciated about Apple.
The control part is blocking third-party apps to toggle the hidden setting. If you enable unsupported features using a third-party app, the expectation of polish is obviously void. It would even be fine if Apple refused to carry apps like that in their polished, curated store, if they didn't forbid users from installing apps any other way.
I think they were controlling the perception that third party apps could change your entire device settings. That was/still is something that iPhone users expect to be “safe”. As in, if I carelessly install an unknown app, it at least can’t do much harm and I can just delete it without having any real consequences. The existence of “hack apps” undermines that layman understanding of their device security
The problem with this is that it should be a permission the user needs to grant to the app rather than something that apps can never do under any circumstances even when the user explicitly wants them to. The latter is just the vendor declaring themselves by self-fiat to be immune from competition in the markets for those device software features.
The problem there is that the primary security mechanism is enumerating badness by policing what apps users can install. That's not nearly as robust as designing the sandbox so apps can't do much harm. If toggling the setting is really dangerous, which it wasn't in this case, it should have been impossible for an app to do without some sort of special access.
I also think users should be in control of granting or denying that kind of special access, but that's a separate discussion.
So then, was it the same thing waiting 5 years longer than most companies to have something as basic as wireless charging? Or waiting until 2023 to finally adopt USB C charging?
They waited to adopt USB-C for mobile because the trust third parties put into Apple was founded on the fact that they guaranteed ten years of support for Lightning and that’s why it was only iPhone that had accessories like clock radio docks and thermal cameras and external Lightning based peripherals for a long time.
It's the standard Apple "We will decide what you can run on your own computer, not you" paternalism that we have come to know and expect, and that they have perfected over the decades.
That wasn't the standard on the Mac, and looks like it still isn't. That platform has a strong tradition of utility apps that add to or modify core OS functions, and when I looked up "essential mac utilities" today, I found recent listicles with items like Alt Tab (an app switcher), Magnet (window management shortcuts), and TinkerTool (change hidden system settings - exactly like emoji toggles for iPhone).
The number of unicode processing bugs that existed (and maybe some still exist) alone is reason to be a bit cautious.
And having emojis work "mostly" but not "everywhere" would have been something Jobs would have entirely been against - if they wouldn't work over normal non-iMessage SMS, for example, or not work reliably.
Remember the "emojigate" issues where the same emoji would display differently on different phones and make a funny message seem threatening, etc?
I thought it was weird when they made the gun emoji look like a toy.. to make threats seem funny? Or some sort of Sapir-Whorf thing? I don't know, it never made sense.
It was more troubling that it was different - so you send a squirt gun, I see a pistol, but even worse was that it was pointing in different directions on different platforms.
I just think there are far too many. Sometimes I just want to add a happy face and there are 500 variations. Then I find one which I think looks happy and hover over it for a second and the tooltip says “shivering anxious constipated”.
