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It’s hard to imagine it now, but during iPhone’s first year, no emoji were available at all. It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard.
But in between 2008 and 2011, there existed a peculiar interregnum where emoji were only available on Japanese iPhones. The situation had to be carefully explained and caveated:
Eventually, an enterprising developer realized that emoji outside Japan was as easy as toggling a UI-less preference with a great name KeyboardEmojiEverywhere, hiding inside the innards of the iPhone:
Except, “easy” is in the eye of the beholder. This was still a few too many hoops to jump for an average iPhone user. So, developers figured out that there could be an app for that: the above preference incantation wrapped inside an application with an easy UI, and put in the burgeoning App Store.
The interesting part is that Apple initially fought some of these efforts, by rejecting a Freemoji app and likely a few others. (Not sure if this was about emoji specifically, or more principally about losing control.)
The developers had to get sneaky, and started hiding emoji enablers inside other apps. A $0.99 “RSS reader for a Chinese Macintosh news site” called FrostyPlace unlocked emoji by “simply pok[ing] around in it for a minute or so by tapping in and out of an article and playing with the two buttons at the bottom of its screen. That part is important, so be sure to do some genuine tapping.”
Then there was the free Spell Number (you can still see its old App Store page), where punching in a certain secret number would give you the same.
The author called it an “easter egg” and even wrote candidly at the end of instructions that “you can also delete Spell Number if you don’t want it, the setting will still be here.” (The number also had to change from 9876543.21 to 91929394.59 at some point, perhaps to evade… something?)
Eventually, Apple seemingly gave up – Ars Technica has a fun interview from 2009 from someone who renamed their app from Typing Genius to “Typing Genius – Get Emoji” and got away with it:
Ars: As the screenshot at the start of this post shows, you haven’t been shy about advertising the Emoji support over at App Store. Are you worried that adding Emoji to your application might have negative consequences? Are you worried about Apple pulling it from App Store?
Fung: I’m obviously taking a risk here by advertising Emoji directly on iTunes. That being said, I’m not the first. Worst case scenario, I’ll update the application with Emoji support removed. I’m hoping that Apple will turn a blind eye to this because I can’t see any harm done in allowing users to use Emoji.
Not quite “I am ready to do some time for the good cause,” but close enough.
Yet, it still took until 2011 for emoji support to be universally available with iOS 5, and even then you had to enable the keyboard in settings.
I like this little story of a mysterious latent cool new thing hiding inside your device, a thing that you could unlock only if you followed some seemingly nefarious instructions that never fully made sense but that actually worked.
An interesting tidbit: At least early on in 2008, for emoji to work both the sender and the recipient had to follow the instructions. So the toggle wasn’t just about adding a keyboard, but also enabling the decoding and rendering. (And complicating things further, iPhone’s Japanese keyboard had emoticons, and that keyboard was widely available without any hacks. The difference between emoji and emoticons was not obvious to many people, leading to a lot of extra confusion.)
Lastly, a fun sidebar: I asked about all this an old internet buddy, Steven Throughton-Smith, whom I remembered back from my GUIdebook days, and who still routinely posts fun hacks and discoveries about Apple platforms on Mastodon. I thought “Steven might remember that story; he seems like the kind of person who’d at least know how to find an answer.” Turns out, my hunch was better than I thought: Steven was the enterprising developer who actually discovered how to give emoji to any iPhone, all the way back in 2008.
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Comments
By UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2026-03-0614:107 reply It’s very easy for people, especially younger people, to look at this with a 2026 understanding of the ubiquity of emoji and scoff at how ludicrous Apple was being. Things were very different. Drive-by Apple decriers will attribute anything possible to Steve Jobs’ vague “desire to control”. The reality is there were things he would obsess over and plenty he would let pass him by. Emoji only made its way into Unicode in the 2010s. The past and present of text encoding, especially text message encoding, was/is a huge mess. I wouldn’t be running in guns blazing if I were them.
By nancyminusone 2026-03-0617:294 reply Anyone else remember the brief time in the mid 2000s that these were called "smileys" and damn near every webpage ad wanted to install a questionable IE 6 toolbar so you could "get more smileys"?
Quality kid memory for me. I also remember watching another kid click on an ad for a free ipod and then enter in his home address and other personal info.
The wikipedia entry for emoji is missing this entirely, but "smileys" were quite popular in various instant messaging apps (AOLIM, ICQ) and web forums. I was fairly sure they go back as far the mid or late 90's but I can't seem to find any hard evidence of that.
(I was into computers at the time but didn't see the point of IM apps or forums when IRC and Usenet already existed.)
By kilroy123 2026-03-0622:16 If you want a trip down memory lane.
By lelanthran 2026-03-0617:462 reply Smileys were something else (pure acid, like this :-)).
ISTR the brief time you mention calling these things emoticons.
By post-it 2026-03-0617:41 Don't forget cursor customizers!
The obsession with control I find objectionable is not their decision not to enable emoji widely until support was stable. That's an obsession with polish, not control. The commitment to polish and self-restraint to not add features until they actually work well is something I've long appreciated about Apple.
The control part is blocking third-party apps to toggle the hidden setting. If you enable unsupported features using a third-party app, the expectation of polish is obviously void. It would even be fine if Apple refused to carry apps like that in their polished, curated store, if they didn't forbid users from installing apps any other way.
I think they were controlling the perception that third party apps could change your entire device settings. That was/still is something that iPhone users expect to be “safe”. As in, if I carelessly install an unknown app, it at least can’t do much harm and I can just delete it without having any real consequences. The existence of “hack apps” undermines that layman understanding of their device security
By burningChrome 2026-03-0620:251 reply So then, was it the same thing waiting 5 years longer than most companies to have something as basic as wireless charging? Or waiting until 2023 to finally adopt USB C charging?
It's the standard Apple "We will decide what you can run on your own computer, not you" paternalism that we have come to know and expect, and that they have perfected over the decades.
The number of unicode processing bugs that existed (and maybe some still exist) alone is reason to be a bit cautious.
And having emojis work "mostly" but not "everywhere" would have been something Jobs would have entirely been against - if they wouldn't work over normal non-iMessage SMS, for example, or not work reliably.
Remember the "emojigate" issues where the same emoji would display differently on different phones and make a funny message seem threatening, etc?
By rpdillon 2026-03-0721:55 Apple does tend to drag their feet a bit, though.
If I recall correctly, it took two years for them to add cut and paste to iOS.
By WalterBright 2026-03-0621:341 reply I used emojis for a while. Every text had to have an emoji. I spent a lot of time scrolling through the emoji palette looking for the perfect emoji.
Eventually, I decided that was a complete waste of time and now I use words.
BTW, one of the things that turned me off from emojis is they looked like the stickers 2nd graders would use, along with a Playmobil look.
By paulddraper 2026-03-0617:41 So Apple worked with emoji, or didn't?
By aaron695 2026-03-073:12 [dead]
Reminds me of typing "webos20090606" or "upupdowndownleftrightleftrightbastart" into the webOS "Just Type" universal search bar, which revealed a hidden developer mode switch that allowed sideloading of apps.
By BoorishBears 2026-03-0620:58 The best mobile OS we ever got, years ahead of its time, doomed by circumstances.
The early (modern) smartphone days were something else
> Steven was the enterprising developer who actually discovered how to give emoji to any iPhone, all the way back in 2008.
I love how this person gets the credit, deservedly so, and the irony of the unsung people who did all the hard work of actually creating the support but with its potential nerfed.
Perhaps a rehabilitation committee can track those people down and we can give their stories and their soulless managers some well earned justice!
By myhf 2026-03-0616:53 [flagged]
