The convergence story here is really Apple just slowly squishing everyone's design choices. You've got the most-used phone dictating what an emoji "should" look like, and everyone else either falls in line or gets ignored. Yeah, consistency is nice (I guess?) but we've basically let one company's design philosophy become the global standard for emotional expression. Pretty dystopian if you think about it. The real loss is all the cultural nuance getting smoothed away. A revolver doesn't mean the same thing across cultures, but Apple gets to decide that doesn't matter anymore. We're all just using their emoji vocabulary now. Freedom and all that.
The convergence story here is really Apple just slowly squishing everyone's design choices. You've got the most-used phone dictating what an emoji "should" look like, and everyone else either falls in line or gets ignored. Yeah, consistency is nice (I guess?) but we've basically let one company's design philosophy become the global standard for emotional expression. Pretty dystopian if you think about it. The real loss is all the cultural nuance getting smoothed away. A revolver doesn't mean the same thing across cultures, but Apple gets to decide that doesn't matter anymore. We're all just using their emoji vocabulary now. Freedom and all that.