Emoticons are probably the best method to partially express our feelings in the discussions we have with different people, but what few of us know is that they do not look exactly the same on different smartphones from which they are sent or on which are received.
Although there is a standard based on which emoji characters are implemented in our smartphones, each mobile terminal manufacturer uses a different font for them, so the final image will look different on one terminal or another, depending on what the manufacturer has achieved .
In this idea, an emoticon sent from an iPhone could look much different on a Samsung, HTC, LG, Google, etc. smartphone than in iOS, and from here to confusion regarding the nature of the messages or serious arguments is only one step.
In the image below you can see how different the same emoticon looks on multiple smartphones, and this is due to the fact that each manufacturer wants to apply a personal note in the design of the emoji character that their smartphone renders for the user.
The problem with this different rendering of emoji characters is that users will misinterpret the message that their interlocutor is trying to express, and a recent study revealed that people describe each character differently depending on the terminal on which it was sent .
Of course, the same study revealed that two people looking at the same emoji on the same type of smartphone can interpret it completely differently, but the potential for communication problems increases if different platforms are used for different emoji characters.
Overall, we found that if you send an emoji across platform boundaries (eg, an iPhone to a Nexus), the sender and the receiver will differ by about 2.04 points on average on our -5 to 5 sentiment scale. However, even Within platforms, the average difference is 1.88 points.
That being said, if you receive an emoji from a user on another platform, you might think that the message they're trying to send you might be a little different from what you're used to.
