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There’s no simple way around this, other than to not use emoji or other characters
Vanishing emojis
QWhen my wife sends texts containing emojis from her iPhone SE, some recipients say they can’t see those characters, instead seeing small boxes, or brackets and dots. They look fine here on my MacBook Pro, though. What can she do? by Robert Russell
AText messages originally used plain text characters from the Roman alphabet, and emoticons, the precursors to emoji, such as :). With more sophisticated phones, messages changed to use Unicode, a cross-platform standard which has grown to support more than 100 script systems covering thousands of languages, a wide range of non-linguistic symbols, and emoji. Older operating systems still running on older and less sophisticated devices don’t support the current Unicode 9 standard which features on iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
When your wife constructs a message including Unicode 9 characters on her iPhone, it’s sent in an encoded form as laid down in that standard. When that message is received by a phone which might only support Unicode version 6.0 from 2010, for example, some of the codes in her message are not recognised as supporting known characters. The phone’s operating system therefore substitutes an open rectangle, the Unicode ‘replacement character’, or inserts [...] to indicate the missing characters. There’s no simple way around this, other than to not use emoji or other characters which aren’t part of these older versions of Unicode. Decoding conformant Unicode is a problem for the recipient, and the best solution is for those still running old versions to upgrade their operating systems (commonly Android) or their phones to achieve full support for Unicode version 9.