Before Unicode
The carrier sets
Emoji were a Japanese mobile phone feature for a decade before Unicode encoded them. These 0 characters are the originals, from the three carriers whose competing sets Unicode later unified into one standard.
No carrier data has been imported yet.
Frequently asked questions
- What are carrier emoji?
- Before Unicode, Japanese mobile operators each shipped their own incompatible emoji sets. An emoji sent between two networks could arrive as the wrong picture or as nothing at all, and resolving that is why emoji were standardised.