Keith Broni, writing at Emojipedia, has a good illustrated survey of how most emoji sets have converged in meaning — almost entirely toward Apple’s designs:
There are several structural reasons why Apple’s designs so often
become the gravitational center of emoji convergence.First, Apple is widely regarded as the “default” emoji design set
in the West. This status dates back to 2008, when Apple introduced
emoji support on the iPhone years before emoji were formally
incorporated into Unicode.
It’s also the case that Apple’s emoji icons are the best, and they’re the most consistent. The only ones Apple has changed the meaning of are ones where the Unicode Consortium has changed or clarified the standard description. The pistol emoji is the exception that proves the rule. Apple, and Apple alone, changed its pistol emoji (🔫) from a realistic firearm to a green plastic squirt gun in 2016. By 2018, all the other major emoji sets had changed their pistols from firearms to plastic toys — almost all of them green squirt guns in particular. (Broni’s post documents this progression year by year.)
One thing that remains interesting to me is that Apple left its emoji style alone when they instituted the great flattening with iOS 7. Apple’s emoji icons are, loosely, in the style of Apple’s application and toolbar icon designs from the Aqua era. People love emoji, and at this point, changing their style to something that felt aligned with the icon designs for Apple’s version 26 OSes would generate outrage. But if Apple were to change its icon style back to this rich 3D textured style, the majority of users wouldn’t object — they’d think it was fun.
Basically, Apple’s emoji style is fun. Apple’s icon style is no-fun. People like having fun.
