I search smilies / emoticons for my Android App.
I found that there are some open source sets available like used by pidgin.
But I was wondering about the emoticons used in Whatsapp.
They are basically very nice. Thus I thought that they are licensed by whatsapp.
Now I have installed the messanger "telegram" and I was suprised. They are using the same emoticons than in whatsapp. How can this work out?
Are the emoticons publicly available?
Both Whatsapp and Telegram (and a lot of other messenger apps, browsers and operating systems) use the Emoji sets.
The different types of Emoji are a result of different fonts for emoticons; they have a different appearance depending on the "font" used but the base is always a unicode set of characters.
Both Whatsapp and Telegram use the Apple implementation apparently, as Ivo's link specifies. Also see this github for more licensing info.
I don't think they are actual of Whatsapp put part of an actual Font.
I don't know if anyone can see it but for example on this wikipage I can see all emoticons like they are on whatsapp, and they are actual symbols in unicode and not images.
EDIT: I can only see them on my iMac (Apple)
This website says they are actual licensed by Apple if I understand correctly (note 2)
WhatsApp and Telegram both use a font that has been made by Apple. Apple doesn't license this font, so what they are doing is actually illegal, although Apple apparently doesn't care.
Related
I have been building a Messenger Bot for about a week now and I had no problems so far. But recently I got stuck in an absurd bug (kind of).
So I use bold text in certain parts of my messages like *bold text* (which translates to bold text) and it works perfectly fine in desktop version of Facebook and also on messenger.com but strangely the android messenger app can't display the text between the asterisks in bold, instead, it just prints out *bold text*
Below are the screenshots to better represent the issue
messenger.com screenshot
Android Messenger App Screenshot
Thank you for reading.
The official help page does indeed state that it only works for computers: https://www.facebook.com/help/147348452522644
Keep in mind that text formatting is only visible on a computer, and will not appear in the Messenger app on mobile.
However, it seems like they've started testing it on mobile:
https://twitter.com/wongmjane/status/1098658053426098176
Can resolve with this simple hack
convert your text using some online unicode text converters (e.g: https://qaz.wtf/u/convert.cgi)
copy converted text and paste into your code. That's it.
This is working in facebook.com, messenger.com and messenger mobile app.
Markdown formatting of text isn't officially supported, so it works sporadically depending on the platform Messenger is being run on.
I am currently making a messenger app for android, and I just added emoticons. Now, I looked at the WhatsApp UI and I realized that they use the iOS emoticons for everything (even the ActionBar) and I was wondering how they had done this.
Is it possible to change Android's emoji texture atlas just for my app or something like that, and if so, where can I get these iOS emoticons and how do I implement that? Or do I have to write my own TextView / EditText / ... and my own emoji keyboard for it to look like WhatsApp's?
Thanks
Edit: I found out that there is an "Apple Color Emoji.ttf" without license that supports these emojis. Can I use this on android?
I want to build a plugin with custom Emoji pack, so when a user will download and install it he could use my custom Emoji.
My Emoji will be very different from the known Emoji and I do realize
that user without my plugin won't be able to see my custom Emoji's.
I tried to use the most popular Emoji's app in Google play like:
Kika Emoji Keyboard
But the experience is very bad, the emoji just look different on the keyboard but when I used them in an app like whatsapp they look the same as the built in ones..
So, my question is:
How can i build a custom plugin with my custom Emoji pack so when a user will install it he could use my Emoji's together with the regular Emoji's?
Thanks.
you can use your custom emojis within your app but you can't use those in other apps as custom unicodes are not supported by android unless you use within your app.For instance most of the emojis supported by Skype are not supported by another apps.
I want to be able to send messages between android and ios devices with the use of emojis.
I know the new android 4.4 supports emoji now but I want to support older devices (2.1 and up).
How do apps like whatsapp allow emojis to be written and viewed even though it is not supported? The only way I could think to accomplish this task is to create custom emojis by creating an image of many emojis and then using the x,y coordinates to get which emoji was selected. The issues with this could be copyright and then when new emojis come out I will always have to update the image and if a user doesn't download the new image they will still have the old emojis and won't be able to view the new ones.
So is there another way of doing this to allow ios emojis to be sent to android and vice versa?
Your custom approach could work. Just add another layer of abstraction -- download the emoji from a central server. Cache it locally. Periodically check to see if there is a new version, and download it. Because it'll remain really simple, old versions of the app will still be able to download and use new emoji whenever you update it.
That is a technical solution to your problem that'll support both platforms. Any copyright concerns are kind of off topic, and very specific to the set of emoji you end up deciding to use.
A large set of emoji have been added to the Unicode standard. So, they're basically just characters you could show with a font. For modern devices, a default font (with new OpenType color support) will be used to show emoji. For older devices, you could simply create your own font or use open source emoji designs and show them in old school black 'n white.
Is it possible to Linkify a phone number so that clinking the link will offer the option of SMS as well as the various diallers on the device?
Currently when the user clicks the phone number on the screen, they're presented with the following:
This should also include the phone's messenger. Is this possible, and if so, how?
It should be possible if you customize Linkify as described in this Android devloper blog entry and use the proper protocol "sms:" like so:
sms:<phone_number>[,<phone-number>]*[?body=<message_body>]
At least according to this website. I didn't test it myself.