Emoticons, etc.

Question

I am looking for emoticons / emoticons for my Android application. I found that there are several open source kits available that are used by pidgin.

But I was wondering about the emoticons used in Whatsapp. They are mostly very pleasant. So I thought they were licensed by whatsapp. Now I have installed the "telegram" and I was surprised. They use the same emoticons than whatsapp. How can this be solved? Are emoticons publicly available?

Answer 1

Both Whatsapp and Telegram (and many other messaging apps, browsers, and operating systems) use the Emoji suite.

Different types of Emoji are the result of different fonts for emoticons; they have a different appearance depending on the font used, but the base is always a set of Unicode characters.

Both Whatsapp and Telegram use the Apple implementation, apparently, as the Ivo link points out. Also see this github for more licensing information.

Answer 2

I don’t think they are valid on Whatsapp that put part of the actual font.

I don’t know if anyone can see this, but, for example, on this wikipage I can see all the emoticons as they are on whatsapp, and they are actual characters in unicode, not images. EDIT: I can only see them on my iMac (Apple)

This website says that they are indeed licensed by Apple, if I understand correctly (note 2)

Answer 3

WhatsApp and Telegram use a font that was made by Apple. Apple does not license this font, so what they do is actually illegal, although Apple does not seem to care.