Jeremy Burge, Emojipedia:
The Google design team were months ahead of Apple with new emoji in the past year. Support for the latest emojis came to Android in the major Nougat release in August of 2016.
Yet the vast majority of Android users still can’t see these new emojis.
What they see, instead, are empty rectangles. Why? Lack of timely Android updates.
New emojis are bundled with system updates for iOS and Android, as emoji fonts and relevant Unicode support is provided at an OS level1.
This system should work well, but the weak link is relying on manufacturers to provide updates in a timely manner.
Vlad Savov reported in September2: most phones at IFA (large tech show in Europe) were running a year-old version of Android.
And:
These aren’t old phones not getting updates: they’re brand new phones running an out of date OS. It’s not a good sign.
Great post from someone who really knows the emoji business. One takeaway? Know that if you are including emoji in a text heading to an Android phone, the recipient might be getting rectangles.
If you click through to the article it has a few examples, but the Android situation is so bad that the examples barely scratch the surface.
A quarter of active devices are stuck back on KitKat (including ones still sold brand new today!), for example, leaving them frozen in Emoji-time in 2014 with just 36% of the current Emoji standard.
If you want an android phone, I guess only buy some sort of Google phone that is mostly vertically integrated like Apple. No point in adding other manufacturers problems into the mix.