To your smartphone, an emoji is just like any other character (e.g., lower-case ‘a’, upper-case ‘B’) and needs to be rendered with a font. Since each smartphone platform (e.g., Apple, Google) has its own emoji font, the same emoji character can look quite different on different smartphone platforms. This is why when a Google Nexus owner sends Google’s grinning face with smiling eyes emoji to a friend with an iPhone, the iPhone owner will actually see Apple’s grinning face with smiling eyes emoji. This problem isn’t just limited to iPhones and Nexuses: check out all the different renderings of the single emoji character we’ve been discussing:
I hate emoji. This is just further proof that it’s not a standard form of communication and conveying your emotions in words that are widely accepted by other English speakers is a much better game plan than sending a yellow blob that could look different depending on which device the recipient is using.