Interesting post by Sebastiaan de With on how tech companies are working together to form universal emoji characters:
Significant design differences in emoji can be a hassle at best, but at worst it completely alters the meaning of a communication, and creates a jarring disconnect between the intended meaning the sender is trying to convey to the recipient. Imagine if the letters of our latin script varied depending on the phone you used!
Here’s where emoji differ from latin script: While Unicode defines the meaning of the emoji, the makers of emoji ‘fonts’ — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter and a few others — are left to interpret how to visualize these textual descriptions in an icon.
For this very reason, I avoid using emoji whenever possible.