Some interesting new regulations are starting to appear surrounding emojis on iOS. Apple is starting to reject apps that use emojis in ways they deem against their rules. Emojipedia, a lifeline for anyone who works in social media from their computer and needs to use emojis for dank memes on their corporate channels, reports that app developers are seeing rejections from Apple for using emoji in their app screenshots, or in their apps themselves that Apple deems unfavorable. One example used is the crying emoji used when users can't connect to Game Center in a game.

Emojis exist in a weird space because technically, they're just a set of unicode characters. Emoji are standardized, so an emoji typed out on Android is theoretically the same as on iPhone, or on a computer. However, the artwork itself is not standardized, which leads to interesting situations like the Google cheeseburger emoji outcry of 2017 (the biggest geopolitical issue of that year) or cases where certain emoji carry different cultural contexts based on tiny details in the artwork. Apple might not own emoji, but they own their emoji depictions, so in theory they are saying that developers can't use their art all willy-nilly on the platform with reckless abandon. Apple's particular emoji art interpretations play a major role in their marketing, in particular with their Animoji.

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However, this also means that Apple is saying that developers can't display a c...