Ever since emoji made their way into the iOS keyboard, I’ve long wanted to create and manage my own list of favorites.

One solution is text substitution, which you can set up on your Mac and sync to iOS. This works, but it’s not really the same thing. I want an actual favorites list that appears right in the keyboard alongside the frequently used emoji.

Sidebar: Each time you select an emoji in macOS or iOS, that emoji is automatically added to the frequently used list, but will eventually fall off the end of the fixed-length list, replaced by the more recently used emoji. A favorite list is permanent. Emoji are favorited until you remove them from the list. The point is, there are two different lists: Frequently Used, and Favorites.

This morning, I was messing with the macOS Mojave beta, and I clicked on the Keyboard Preferences icon in the Mac menu bar. One of the choices in that menu is Show Emoji & Symbols.

If you pick that option, the Character Viewer window will appear. If you tap Emoji in the sidebar, a familiar view of all the Apple emoji will appear. If you tap a particular emoji, a large view of that emoji will appear in the upper right corner.

As an example, here’s the big view of the “hat with bow” emoji:

Note the “Add to Favorites” button under the emoji. Press the button, and a new Favorites category will appear in the Character Viewer window, just above Emoji in the sidebar and just below Frequently Used:

This list of favorites will also appear in the popup viewer, which you bring up by typing control-command-space anytime you are in a text-edit field.

Wonderful! But.

As far as I can tell, and I’ve yet to find anyone on Twitter who has a different experience than me, there’s no way to translate this Favorites list to iOS. This seems an obvious next step (apparently, the favorites button has been part of macOS for some time, not new to Mojave) and my hope is that someone at Apple is working on syncing the emoji favorites list created in macOS with iOS.