For the longest time, many people thought the standard flag emoji that was included in their texting app was the flag of Texas. Not so, and unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be one on the horizon any time soon. However, if it were, you can bet Texans and Tex-pats everywhere would be using that thing until the touch-screen wore out!
Lifestyle
Texas Emojis: Doesn’t Everyone Want an ‘Alamoji’?
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Photo: Pixabay
So, who does create emojis, and how do we get them on our phone? A brief history of emojis begins in Japan. According to an article by The Verge, we have Shigetaka Kurita, the father of the emoji, to thank for the every-growing ability we now have to express our emotions in electronic form. He and a team of designers went to work in Japan in 1999 through a company called NTT DoCoMo, and with a lot of uphill battling, by 2005, there was a minimum of 800 emojis for use across all carriers in Japan. How did they become globally accessed? Enter Apple. In 2007, they wanted badly to break into the Japanese market. To do so, they developed an emoji keyboard into their latest version of the iPhone. It was ultimately a “hidden” feature in American versions, but tech-savvy users in the U.S. didn’t take long to figure out that if they downloaded a Japanese language app, they could force their phones to unlock the emojis. From that point on, their use spread like wildfire!
Photo: Flickr/Joe Hall
The propagation of emojis in an international fashion (where you can send a smiley face in the U.S., and it still translates into a smiley face in Japan,) didn’t happen overnight. It took the use of Unicode Standard and a lot of work to make access and use a reality. This computing industry standard which is meant to ensure a level of consistency in the handling and encoding of text expressions throughout the majority of the world’s writing systems has made way for the standard set of emojis that you now see and use. Now, with each new major update to phone systems, so too do the emojis.
Photo: Facebook/Sarah K Sawyer
So, to have a consistent listing of Texas emojis that are easily translatable across all user systems and phone settings (so a Texan can send an Alamo or a Big Tex emoticon from San Antonio and have it show up the very same on a Tex-pat’s phone in Britain, Australia, or Japan even,) the powers that be – Google and Apple – need to be petitioned to create the coding and formatting to allow for that to happen in a future update. The representation of Texas in emojis would be a very admirable and user-friendly capability we’re sure everyone would accept universally. After all, doesn’t everyone want to have an “alamoji” on their phones?
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