In my ideal world, people would have a standard library of SVG emoji on their phones, they can send them around, but they can also save the emojis others use to their own library. Of course, artists can add new SVG emoji and send them around.

This way, we get an evolving library of emoji, just like languages evolve. Unicode is stiffling this evolution.

Interestingly (but commercially) the very popular Line app, which IMO has the best "stickers," lets you do something like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(software)

If I buy a set of stickers (little animations, much more expressive than emojis) I can send them to anyone in chats, or I can send the set as a gift to that user; in the latter case, the user can add them to their library.

Your library is the standard stickers, any free stickers you've added, anything you've bought, and anything you've been gifted.

The end result is that some people have a fairly distinct sticker-communication style because they have in their library relatively obscure ones, or just like to use the less-popular free ones.

In theory anyone can make their own stickers but it's kind of a pain, and I haven't gotten around to it:

https://creator.line.me/en/stickermaker/

So in my ideal world, we'd not have any emojis that can't be reduced to expressive ASCII, but we'd have a massive public library of freely available SVG Stickers with accessibility features, and all the chat apps would use them.

Well, as long as you can use these stickers in an in-line way. The graphic should be part of the sentence, not just an addition to it, although the latter should be possible too I guess.

Interestingly, you can insert text to some stickers.

Oh, very interesting. Makes sense, since (mostly Japanese) text features in a lot of them. I’ll have to look for those.

You can’t, but there are a large set of built-in emoji-like inline graphics in addition to the normal emojis. Some of them quite good but the selection seems a bit random. They are privileged over keyboard emojis in that they pop up for selection when you type keywords. AFAIK users can’t create their own.

However, stickers have a culture of their own, and I don’t think it’s inferior to emojis, maybe it’s even better. You can express a lot in a sticker or two, without words, and quickly. And they’re not tiny ambiguous glyphs, they have the room they need.

So far in my Line experience I’m the only one using emojis (I should probably stop) because it seems like the standard is to use text to say specific things and use stickers to convey emotions.

I’m a foreigner and don’t have a million Line friends, but that’s how it looks to me.

We've had that in forums and IM, but it never took off. Maybe it was just too early back then, but I'm not sure.

> People expect emojis to look like on iPhone

Not really. Just Apple users.